Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[forsyth]

>>Surely, people get turned off plan9 by having to find specific hardware just to try
>>it out!

i'm somewhat surprised but equally encouraged by how many people do.

Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[nigel]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 66 bytes --]

Plex86 has a long way to go, commendable though the effort is.


[-- Attachment #2: Type: message/rfc822, Size: 2624 bytes --]

From: paurea@dei.inf.uc3m.es
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 20:22:30 +0200
Message-ID: <15085.44390.378910.364737@nido.hilbert.space>

chad writes:
 > From: chad <yandros@mit.edu>
 > Subject: Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware
 > Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 09:34:09 -0400
 >
 >
 > There's no doubt by anyone that there is potential value in being able
 > to run Plan 9 inside of VMware.  The problem is that VMWare considers
 > the software video system to be proprietary information that they're
 > not currently interested in sharing with outside parties.

There is an open source project very similar to VMware,
http://www.plex86.org/ I don't know its actual state of development,
but maybe it is a good substitute...
--
                 Saludos,
                         Gorka

"Curiosity sKilled the cat"
--
    /"\
    \ /    ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
     X                           - against ms attachments
    / \

Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[jmk]

Rob and I had a private mail conversation with someone about VMware
last week. Here's a summary of my input:

The topic of VMware has been popping up for years. The sticking points are
1) ethernet doesn't work out of the box;
2) display doesn't work out of the box.

On 1), I looked at this a couple of years ago and reckoned the AMD79C970
driver we have was 98% ready for it.
On 2), I saw the described patches [source code patch for Xfree86 version 4]
at some point but then forgot where they were by the time the VMware topic
popped up again. From the description it sounds doable.

At one point I even purchased a copy of VMware in order to do those things
but didn't get to install it as I have neither a Win2K or Linux machine.

I think all it takes to get this working is for someone who has Plan 9
already installed and has VMware to do a little hacking, but no one seems
to want to actually do the work. It's not even as if there would be any
compatibility problems with the declaration of 'main' to surmount.

--jim

Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[rob pike]

	I've tried to boot Plan9 in Vmware, but the VGA-Card seems not to be
	supported.

	could anybody help me, or send me a link to a Homepage I could find help.

Lots of people have asked for this but no one has done the work. If someone
wants to write the drivers for the VMware pseudo-hardware and give us back
the changes, I can point them to the necessary information. We don't run
VMware so it's not a priority for us.

-rob

Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[matt]

Hello rob,

Monday, April 30, 2001, 1:10:47 PM, you wrote:

rp>         I've tried to boot Plan9 in Vmware, but the VGA-Card seems not to be
rp>         supported.

rp>         could anybody help me, or send me a link to a Homepage I could find help.

rp> Lots of people have asked for this but no one has done the work. If someone
rp> wants to write the drivers for the VMware pseudo-hardware and give us back
rp> the changes, I can point them to the necessary information. We don't run
rp> VMware so it's not a priority for us.

rp> -rob

I think it would be a major benefit to potential users. Either for
VMWare which runs Win/Linux or even win4Lin wich runs on Linux (or
maybe even bochs)

It would save heaps on writing drivers for all that esoteric hardware
out there, if you invested some time into doing a reference VMWare set
of stuff for FS, CPU and term.

Surely, people get turned off plan9 by having to find specific hardware just to try
it out!


--
Best regards,
 matt                            mailto:matt@proweb.co.uk

Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[chad]

There's no doubt by anyone that there is potential value in being able
to run Plan 9 inside of VMware.  The problem is that VMWare considers
the software video system to be proprietary information that they're
not currently interested in sharing with outside parties.  If VMware
customers were to ask for Plan 9 support, they would be much more
inclined to provide such information, and I encourage you to do so (I
have).  The Bell Labs/Lucent people don't use VMware, and so haven't
felt it a more pressing target than, say, the recent nVidia cards.

I'm basing these statements off of information gleaned from this
mailing list over the past couple years; the relevant messages are
probably easily findable in the archives.

chad

Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[paurea]

chad writes:
 > From: chad <yandros@mit.edu>
 > Subject: Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware
 > Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 09:34:09 -0400
 >
 >
 > There's no doubt by anyone that there is potential value in being able
 > to run Plan 9 inside of VMware.  The problem is that VMWare considers
 > the software video system to be proprietary information that they're
 > not currently interested in sharing with outside parties.

There is an open source project very similar to VMware,
http://www.plex86.org/ I don't know its actual state of development,
but maybe it is a good substitute...
--
                 Saludos,
                         Gorka

"Curiosity sKilled the cat"
--
    /"\
    \ /    ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
     X                           - against ms attachments
    / \

Re: [9fans] 9 on VMware

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

matt wrote:
> Surely, people get turned off plan9 by having to find
> specific hardware just to try it out!

I'm sure they do, but what is the alternative?
PC clones have so many radically different flavors of
hardware for a given function (such as Ethernet I/F,
video display, mouse) that it is a minor miracle that
the distribution supports as much variety as it does.
A system architect could learn a lot about how not to
do things from the PC experience.

[9fans] 9 on VMware

[Bastian Roy]

I've tried to boot Plan9 in Vmware, but the VGA-Card seems not to be
supported.

could anybody help me, or send me a link to a Homepage I could find help.

Tank you