Standalone SPARC.

Standalone SPARC.

[Al]

In article <9510101023.AA00563@nextstep.uk.sun.com> you wrote:
: Hi,
: 	Where did you get plan 9 for SPARC from ? 

See http://plan9.att.com
and look for the distribution page.
To get any of the other binaries other than the x86 you have to spend
$350 buying it and trundling it over from the states (which apparently
they do with a modicum of efficiency)...its then a question of installing
whether you have a pc networked to it (which is the suggested way) or if
you can persuade your workstation to boot from CD with some tweaking to 
the likes of the tftp boot... (afaik)...

hope this helps,

al

Standalone SPARC.

[Steve]

Andrew.Holt@UK.Sun.COM wrote:
> Where did you get plan 9 for SPARC from ? 

It's on the Plan 9 cdrom. There aren't any free trial versions for the sparc.

Standalone SPARC.

[Andrew]

Hi,
	Where did you get plan 9 for SPARC from ? 
	
	I would like to run it but cant find it.
	
rgds Andrew

Standalone SPARC.

[Byron]

Thanks for the note. I have been struggling through similar steps;
however, I booted from CDROM and copied the CDROM to a kfs partition.

The way I did it was to suck off 9sscd on a Unix machine and tftpboot
my Sun from that.

Now, my question is, how do I get my sun to boot from local disk, i.e.,
to get its root partition from there? I don't particularly want its
root partition to be served by 9fs.
-- 
Byron Rakitzis                                  Network Appliance
<byron@netapp.com>                              319 N. Bernardo
(415) 428-5104                                  Mountain View, CA 94043

Standalone SPARC.

[Alex]

I've got a few questions about this.

1) I successfully unpacked the CD onto my drive. After I was done with
   it, I tried to reboot but all I found on the drive (sd1) was the
   old SunOS partition I had on it before and none of the new files. I
   figure I need to do a (SunOS) format before actually doing this,
   correct?

2) Let's say I get my sd1 drive to contain a kfs, how would I use it
   in the boot process? The 9ss kernel doesn't really give me a choice
   to boot locally. Or can I select il and point to my own address? Or
   is there a third boot option like local!#w/w1disk? 

3) Does anyone know if there's a way to actually boot the 9ss from the
   internal disk? In the UniOsnabrueck paper (thanks for sending it,
   Petra) it says you can just do a "boot 9ss". Does that mean if I
   take a newly formatted disk under SunOS and do an installboot on
   it, it would be happy? I kinda doubt it. Or is there a SPARC
   version of home(8)?

4) I had a bunch of trouble with the u9fs stuff. Here some tips how I
   finally got it working. I compiled only with the BSD, NEEDPROTO,
   and LOG defines. I used gcc and the -ansi option. And I hardcoded
   "/plan9" in the chroot in u9fs.c because for some reason inetd
   refused to hand over the parameters I had in /etc/inetd.conf. That
   was on a sun4m SPARC with 4.1.3_U1.

Thanks a bunch.

Alex.

>                                        Net-boot 9ss on the
> IPX, login as 'none'.  You should see a clock and a little window saying
> installation complete, welcome to plan 9, this is rc.
> 
> Now set up the local disk and CD rom player, like so: 
> 
> bind -a '#'w3 /dev  (I assume the disk is at SCSI 3, as usual)
> bind -a '#'R6 /dev  (this gets the CD player)
> 
> (Don't forget the '-a'... /dev gets really small if you do.)
> 
> disk/prep /dev/sd3disk
> 
> answer 'a' to the question to get the default partitions.
> 
> disk/kfs -rb4096 -f/dev/sd3fs  (kinda like newfs)
> 
> mkdir /n/kfs; mount -c /srv/kfs /n/kfs
> 
> Now you have a local filesystem on /n/kfs.  Try
> 
> disk/kfscmd sync
> 
> as a sanity check.
> 
> 9660srv  (sets up CD player service)
> 
> mkdir /n/cdrom; mount -c /srv/9660 /n/cdrom /dev/cd6
> 
> Now you have the local disk and CD player ready to go.
> 
> disk/kfscmd allow  (Not sure if this is really needed, but turning off
> 	            permissions sounded cool.)
> 
> Now you want to unpack the CD onto the local disk:
> 
> disk/mkfs -a -u /adm/users -s /n/cdrom /lib/proto/allproto |
> 	disk/mkext -u -v -d/n/kfs -z4096
> 
> (This gets a "usage" grumble from mkext but it seems to work.  Didn't
> work without the -d/n/kfs, though the manpage implies it should.)
> 
> The -v will generate a 
> 
> x /n/kfs/some/file/name
> 
> message as the files are extracted.
> 

Standalone SPARC.

[forsyth]

>>disk/kfscmd allow  (Not sure if this is really needed, but turning off
>>	            permissions sounded cool.)

it is needed.  disk/mkext -u ... can't set the owner of files and directories
otherwise.

Standalone SPARC.

[Jim]

This is probably maximally inelegant, but this appears to work. I'm
starting with a Sun IPX with internal disk, Sun CDROM attached at ID 6
with the distribution CD in it. 

Get 9fs going on a UNIX box; do a global chmod on your plan 9 tree to set
everything to be owned by 'none'.  (Ie, if /plan9/etc/passwd has 'none' as
uid 900, do a find /plan9 -print | xargs chown 900.) Net-boot 9ss on the
IPX, login as 'none'.  You should see a clock and a little window saying
installation complete, welcome to plan 9, this is rc.

Now set up the local disk and CD rom player, like so: 

bind -a '#'w3 /dev  (I assume the disk is at SCSI 3, as usual)
bind -a '#'R6 /dev  (this gets the CD player)

(Don't forget the '-a'... /dev gets really small if you do.)

disk/prep /dev/sd3disk

answer 'a' to the question to get the default partitions.

disk/kfs -rb4096 -f/dev/sd3fs  (kinda like newfs)

mkdir /n/kfs; mount -c /srv/kfs /n/kfs

Now you have a local filesystem on /n/kfs.  Try

disk/kfscmd sync

as a sanity check.

9660srv  (sets up CD player service)

mkdir /n/cdrom; mount -c /srv/9660 /n/cdrom /dev/cd6

Now you have the local disk and CD player ready to go.

disk/kfscmd allow  (Not sure if this is really needed, but turning off
	            permissions sounded cool.)

Now you want to unpack the CD onto the local disk:

disk/mkfs -a -u /adm/users -s /n/cdrom /lib/proto/allproto |
	disk/mkext -u -v -d/n/kfs -z4096

(This gets a "usage" grumble from mkext but it seems to work.  Didn't
work without the -d/n/kfs, though the manpage implies it should.)

The -v will generate a 

x /n/kfs/some/file/name

message as the files are extracted.

Standalone SPARC.

[forsyth]

>>look like SunOS and plan9 are counting blocks the same way.  Anyone know
>>how to reconcile the numbers? 

i think you'll find that SunOS cheats in two ways:
 - it reserves a few cylinders (`alt cyl') to provide replacement blocks
   for bad blocks
 - more seriously (in terms of the amount of space), SunOS has the notion
   of (say) a 500 Mbyte disc.  that might be implemented by a disc that
   is 535 mbytes or 520 mbytes or precisely 500 mbytes (formatted).
   it simplifies supplying and replacing discs, when the discs come
   from several manufacturers, with slightly different capacities.

Plan 9 displays the results of a SCSI `get capacity' request, which
should be precise.

see /etc/format.dat on SunOS for more details.
it isn't a bad idea, given the practical restrictions, but it does lead
to the situation you describe.

oh yes.  the `bad block replacement' area is probably not needed on
a modern system; a good SCSI drive should implement the `block replace'
function.

Standalone SPARC.

[Jim]

I'm trying to get an IPX running standalone; so far I have 9ss running on
the IPX (incidently 9ss won't boot on an IPC; anybody fixed that?) getting
the files from u9fs.  Before launching into kfs on the local disk I though
I'd try setting up cfs and so define a cache partition for plan9 on the
local disk.  Now after I bind '#'w3 /dev, disk/prep sees the local disk on
the IPX, a Sun207 Maxtor -- but it thinks there are 415436 sectors in the
disk.  The SunOS format program says 406296. That's about 28 cylinders
(and not an even number of cylinders at that). 

I was hoping I could have SunOS and a plan9 cfs partition sharing the
disk, by defining a partition in prep that covered the SunOS disk blocks
and then never referring to that partition inside plan9.  But it doesn't
look like SunOS and plan9 are counting blocks the same way.  Anyone know
how to reconcile the numbers? 

Standalone SPARC.

[Byron]

I would appreciate if you could post your result back, or drop me a line.

I have a Sun at home I would like to run plan9 on. I am thinking of putting
in a second disk so that I can use the Sun ROM to boot a plan9 kernel out
of a UFS partition (on the first disk, which will still contain SunOS) and
put plan9 on the second disk.
-- 
Byron Rakitzis                                  Network Appliance
<byron@netapp.com>                              319 N. Bernardo
(415) 428-5104                                  Mountain View, CA 94043

Standalone SPARC.

[Reg]

Please post or email a summary.  I am considering suing a SPARC 1+ so
as to avoid all the PC hassles.

Thanks.
-- 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reginald H. Beardsley                                      rhb@acm.org

                       Consultant/Programmer 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Standalone SPARC.

[Alex]

I was trying to post to the newsgroup earlier, but it looks like it
failed. Anyway, here's what I am trying to do. I got a SPARC2 which I
would like to set up as a standalone system (at most one other UNIX
system as a u9fs server). I can load the 9ss image over the net just
fine (from a remote TFTP server), but then get stuck with the
authentication. I read Kotsopoulos' installation draft, but a seperate
CPU server is assumed there. I was also trying to get a hold of the
Gremeyer/Schreiner paper but no such luck.

Could anyone who has done a (successful) standalone SPARC installtion
please drop me a note?

Thanks!

--
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