Cannot boot Plan 9 in my motherboard

Cannot boot Plan 9 in my motherboard

[Borja]

	Hello,

	After buying a CDROM drive and a SCSI hard disk,
I have tried to install Plan 9 in my machine. I had installed it
putting the disk in a machine I borrowed from a friend without
trouble. (Well, actually I hadn't the CDROM reader yet,
so the disk has only the three-diskette set installed).

	Today I have tried to boot the disk in my machine
(a 386/25 with 387, 8 MB of RAM and OPTI chipset)
without success. The motherboard is rather old (the BIOS is from 1990).

	The SCSI adapter is a Adaptec 1540CF and the disk is a Quantum 
Trailblazer (850 MB)

	The system has crashed when it prompts "root from:.... #w0/..."
At that point the keyboard didn't respond. Does it stil use the BIOS in
that stage to read the disk (it could be a problem of too many cylinders)
or may it is another kind of compatibility problem?

	Ah, the system didn't give any panic message; simply died
silently.

	If I cannot make it work I will buy another motherboard...


	Thanks in advance,



	Borja Marcos.



-- 
*******************************************************************
Borja Marcos               | Preferred: borjam@we.lc.ehu.es
Alangoeta, 11, 1. izq.     | Others:    borjamar@mx.sarenet.es
48990 - Algorta (Vizcaya)  |            100015.3502@compuserve.com
SPAIN                      | CIS:       100015,3502
******************************************************************

Cannot boot Plan 9 in my motherboard

[Jeremy]

On Sep 10,  6:38pm, Borja Marcos wrote:
> 	Starting other programs such as mothra gave "Not enough bitmap
> memory..." (more or less, I haven't written down the messages, sorry).
> If I opened another shell window, the menu for the button three appeared
> garbled with the background.
> 
> 	Do you think it's an incompatibility with the motherboard? Or is
> it just a small swap partition? ( I have the default 10 MB partition).

I get this too.  I doubt it's a motherboard compatability problem.
When I use 1152x864x8 I can only get up a couple of small windows.
Enlarging them or trying to create new ones just fails.  Creating
windows with the window command fails with a message something like
"out of resources".  If I run sam on the bare console in this mode, it
often fails with a message about not being able to allocate bitmap
memory.

If I run the system at 1024x768x1, none of this happens, so I assume
it's a memory problem.  However, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of
either real or virtual memory when the allocations fail, so I assume
it's some pool of kernel memory which is being exhausted.  I looked at
the code, but not closely enough to see what was going on.

How does one run a reasonable number of usefully sized windows at high
resolutions?

Details: #9 GXE 64 video card, i486 DX2 66, 16MB memory, IDE drive.

	J

Cannot boot Plan 9 in my motherboard

[forsyth]

>>as the argument, but the system continued to fail to enlarge the window.

>>	Starting other programs such as mothra gave "Not enough bitmap
>>memory..." (more or less, I haven't written down the messages, sorry).
i completed the fix for part of this today: it's a refinement of a change i had to
make earlier for just the reason given above.  the problem is that on the PC
architecture, the screen dimensions and depth are highly variable within certain limits.
when the /dev/bitblt device is initialised, it allocates three screenfuls
of memory for bitmaps (failing that, a single screenful).  this works on most
machines, but the key variables can be zero (or at least too small) on the PC.
aux/vga sorts nearly everything out, but the memory allocated by /dev/bitblt
after that can be given back to the system for general allocation.  /dev/bitblt
will try to get it back on demand, but it allocates screenfuls,
and internal fragmentation of the kernel's memory pool means it can fail
(even though on my 16Mbyte machine there was over 3Mbytes available in all).

i'll try to post the changes tomorrow.  meanwhile, try adding

kernelpercent=40

to the plan9.ini file; see plan9.ini(8) for details and further explanation.

i find this makes things work as well as can be expected on a 4mbyte terminal.

Cannot boot Plan 9 in my motherboard

[Borja]

> 
> yes, try it with a boot floppy. i'm surprised that if b.com manages to load the kernel
> from the scsi disc that the kernel won't run. also ensure there's no shadow bios
> enabled.

	The BIOS shadow was disabled as I use the motherboard with SCO
Unix.

	I have been trying another motherboard and have seen strange effects.
After installing the full CDROM system and booting it, I have tried to
enlarge the shell window it creates when you boot as "tor" but the system
simply hasn't done it. It happened in fact when I was trying the
four-diskette set vefore receiving the CDROM, but I thought it was a 
memory problem, as the "swap" command isn't present in the diskettes.
After happening that, I have executed the swap comand giving /dev/sd0swap
as the argument, but the system continued to fail to enlarge the window.

	Starting other programs such as mothra gave "Not enough bitmap
memory..." (more or less, I haven't written down the messages, sorry).
If I opened another shell window, the menu for the button three appeared
garbled with the background.

	Do you think it's an incompatibility with the motherboard? Or is
it just a small swap partition? ( I have the default 10 MB partition).

	Is there an easy way of setting up a bigger swap partition before
installing the CDROM? I have set up manually a partition table with a
40 MB swap partition, but the CDROM installation has overwritten it.

	Thank you very much, 




	Borja.

> 
> --jim
> 


-- 
*******************************************************************
Borja Marcos               | Preferred: borjam@we.lc.ehu.es
Alangoeta, 11, 1. izq.     | Others:    borjamar@mx.sarenet.es
48990 - Algorta (Vizcaya)  |            100015.3502@compuserve.com
SPAIN                      | CIS:       100015,3502
******************************************************************