[9fans] not enough memory with fossil+venti standard setup

[9fans] not enough memory with fossil+venti standard setup

[jorge]

Hello!

after a long term my interest in Plan9 received new input by Tim
Newsham's ninefs. My current employee forces me to use computing
infrastructure based on Microsoft Operating systems. With ninefs i hope
to be able to use a fossil+venti fileserver instead of our ubiquitous
project "SHARE".

To start playing around, i got myself an obsoleted Dell Latitude, Model
CPt, about eight years old by now, and downloaded the current Plan9
installation CD.

First problem: the bootloader starts, scans the IDE-Controller but does
not find the CD-ROM neither the harddisk.

So i take the Plan9 CD home, and start over with my old Compaq Armada
1700, probably two years older then the Dell, it has even a floppy
drive!
Hooray - the Armada boots the installation system and i can proceed with
a default fossil+venti installation.  After reboot:

Second problem: "out of physical memory; no swap configured"

After confirming the "root is from" prompt and specifying user "glenda"
Plan9 tries to start venti, where it runs out of memory.

There is a line before the "root is from" line upon boot, it says:

160M memory: 66M kernel data, 93M user, 368M swap

Three days later (well, i don't have much time for playing around each
day) i finally found out about venti.conf's  mem, bcmem and icmem and
set ridiculously small values for them, which makes my future file
server finally start up.

I did not experience this behaviour two years ago. Why does current
venti use memory settings which are incompatible with available physical
memory?  Why does Plan9 say that there is "no swap configured"?

Ok, so the disk with the readily installed Plan9 OS was returned to the
Dell Latitude. By the way, venti's default memory settings don't work
here either with:

256M memory: 105M kernel data, 151M user, 576M swap

Third problem: no ethernet

I guess this is because the TI PCI1220/1225 is not supported.

Find below the pci devices as given from Linux' lspci output

Regards,

        Jorge-Le�n

Dell Latitude CPt:

Host/PCI bridge:        Intel 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX
IDE:                    Intel 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
CardBus bridge:         Texas Instruments PCI1225 (rev 01)
Ethernet (PCMCIA Card): Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)

Compaq Armada 1700:

Host/PCI bridge:        Intel 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX
IDE:                    Intel 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
CardBus bridge:         Texas Instruments PCI1220 (rev 02)
Ethernet (PCMCIA Card): Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)

Re: [9fans] not enough memory with fossil+venti standard setup

[Steve Simon]

It may be of interes, I run plan9 in an  almost pure windows shop,
I have written aux/cifs a windows file server protocl client
which allows me to mount DFS shares on our company server.

I also have a couple of tools which allow me to connect to a windows
PC running a service I have written, this will one day mutate into
a full cpu(1) server but at present uses its own protocol. This also
integrates with cifs quite well so I can type dos(1) and open a cmd.exe
in the same directory on the file server as I was in on plan9,
and I can also plumb files in cmd.exe and have them open in sam.

This works well for me as most of the tools I need on windows
are command line based, for the few gui ones I need I vnc onto a
machine.

cifs is in the contrib package steve/cifs the dos(1) dosd(1) and
listen(1) for windows are not reliably published (and not as well
documented), but I can make them available if you are interested.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] not enough memory with fossil+venti standard setup

[Federico G. Benavento]

yes, the venti thing was just weird, I installed
Plan 9 last week or so in vmware and venti
was using 700MB ram, the vm had only 512MB...

what's with venti?

--
Federico G. Benavento

Re: [9fans] not enough memory with fossil+venti standard setup

[ron minnich]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Federico G. Benavento
<benavento@gmail.com> wrote:
> yes, the venti thing was just weird, I installed
> Plan 9 last week or so in vmware and venti
> was using 700MB ram, the vm had only 512MB...
>
> what's with venti?


you really need to tell venti something about how much memory to use,
or it will go a bit crazy on you, chewing up your machine and memory
too. I think there's a fix in patch queue, not sure.

ron