Re: [9fans] VMware

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

> Has anyone had any new luck getting R3 running under VMware?  I've seen
> comments about the :
> 
> VMware Workstation PANIC:
> 
> NOT_IMPLEMENTED F(562):1654
> 
> I have only seen that on VMware running on K6 processors.  I had
> different problems when running on a Pentium III, a loaner notebook I
> had :) that is now gone :(  In fact, I remember getting much further,
> but don't remember the problem there.  Has anyone tried
> Plan9/VMware/Intel cpu?  I could live without Ethernet (PPP over the
> virtual serial is OK with me...)

I havn't tried it yet, but was interested in doing so. The biggest show
stopper as far as I can see (as I think I have mentioned before)
is that in VMware only emulates a VGA hardware with 640x480 and 16
colours - which Plan9 won't be too happy with.

Support for higher resolution is achieved by installing custom
drivers which talk to VMware, rather than emulating any real
hardware. These drivers are only supplied for 'supported'
operating systems. And VMware considers the interface proprietary
and when I asked they indicated that they can not divulge it.

This is not a situation I am happy with, so have not yet felt
inspired to pay for a VMware license. It is a pity, because it
otherwise sounds very appealing.

Perhaps a solution, which might also be useful in many other situations,
would be a Plan 9 'virtual' graphics driver which, instead of supporting
directly connected graphics hardware, spits X protocol packets over
a network to allow a remote display to be used. 

VNC may be another option - I am not sure if it requires real local
hardware to mirror, though.

An X based 'pseudo-device' would provide the same 'system in a window'
capability you get for supported VMware guest operating systems,
with the added bonus of being able to do the same for systems runnning
on physicaly separate hardware. Plus it could provide a fall-back
solution for all those systems with unsupported (by Plan 9)
graphics hardware - if you have an X-term or X equipped Unix workstation
on your network, then you have a display that Plan 9 can use.

I have a bit of experience programming at the Xlib (and below) level,
but none at all in writing Plan 9 display drivers, so I don't know
how practical this would be. I would guess that, as a worst case,
one could just treat the X window as just a large bitmap, and
ignore all the windowing, fonts etc functionality of the X protocol.

Of course there is still the problem of getting VMware's emulated AMD
ethernet device to work with the Plan 9 driver. Last I heard, that
was still problematic due to some emulation flaw that doesn't effect
the supported guest OS's.

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk