Plan 9 for dual Pentium machine...

[jim mckie jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com]

In porting Brazil to a dual Pentium system I basically threw away all the PC
device drivers and started from scratch as I was unsure how many of them were
MP-safe (I know I wrote some which weren't). I've been writing drivers on an
as-needed basis and currently the only drivers are for Buslogic SCSI controllers,
the AMD79C970 ethernet controller, the 3COM EtherLinkIII and Fast Etherlink
controllers and the UARTs; these drivers bear little resemblance to those distributed.
Note there is no VGA (or mouse) driver, not necessary for a CPU server.
Much of the initialisation, memory management and interrupt handling code was
completely rewritten too, some of it had to be but some of it just needed going
over again, it had been a long time.

The code could be back-ported to Plan 9 but there's no incentive here to do so.
However, I intend to fix-up the fileserver kernel sometime to incorporate all the
fixes found since the distribution was cut and that may be a good candidate for
back-porting the MP code to.

Regarding hardware, I've used an ASUS PCI/E-P54NP4D, a Gigabyte GA-586ID and a Tyan
Tempest S1462 (there are details on these boards in the FAQ). If you can wait there
will be a new generation of boards shipping in the next few weeks based on the
Triton-II chipset which promises much better memory and I/O bandwidth than those
above which are all based on the older but more stable Neptune chipset. The older
boards are probably listed above in order of decreasing preference.

--jim

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From:	Ta-Wei Li <skat.usc.edu!taweil>
To:	9fans <cse.psu.edu!9fans>
Subject: Plan 9 for dual Pentium machine...
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Hi,

  A while ago I asked a question about the availablility of Plan 9 for
dual Pentium system and I got a reply saying that a dual Pentium has
been done for Brazil but there was no plan for such port of Plan
9. I'd like to know if this is still true. I am planning on getting a
new machine to set up a CPU server and if Plan 9 is available for dual
Pentium machine, I'd like to know which motherboard it supports.

Thanks.

-- 
Ta-Wei Li