[9fans] power pc port

[9fans] power pc port

[David Presotto]

Sape consolidated our various powerpc ports and updated
the code to sources '/sys/src/9/power'.  Cheers.

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[David Presotto]

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Arghh.  As people pointed out, /sys/src/9/power is a bad choice because it
clashes with the old sgi stuff that we don't support but others might still
be using.  I renamed it to /sys/src/9/ppc.

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From: David Presotto <presotto@closedmind.org>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] power pc port
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 11:03:14 -0400
Message-ID: <a6c02621f0a7221fc6decae6db2ede0d@plan9.bell-labs.com>

Sape consolidated our various powerpc ports and updated
the code to sources '/sys/src/9/power'.  Cheers.

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[plan9]

Which machines or boards are ``blast'' and ``ucu'' configfiles related to ?

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[plan9]

presotto@closedmind.org (David Presotto) wrote in message news:<4b5afb74f399e57bd8c123746c233c27@plan9.bell-labs.com>...
> Arghh.  As people pointed out, /sys/src/9/power is a bad choice because it
> clashes with the old sgi stuff that we don't support but others might still
> be using.  I renamed it to /sys/src/9/ppc.
> --

The question was : what are those 2 new machines that support Plan 9 ?
Where can we buy them ?

PS : It is annoying to see how some people avoid some subjects...

Platform	Publicly available			Kernel Status

Intel x86		YES				actively supported
SGI			Yes				discontinued
NeXT			Yes				discontinued
Gnot			???				discontinued
Viaduct			NO				discontinued
SparcStation		YES				discontinued
Bitsy (ARM)		YES				merely supported
AlphaPC			YES				merely supported
Magnum			YES				discontinued

UCU			???				????????????
BLAST			???				????????????

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Sape Mullender]

> The question was : what are those 2 new machines that support Plan 9 ?
> Where can we buy them ?
>
> UCU			???				????????????
> BLAST			???				????????????

You can't buy them.  The UCU is a telco board with a PowerPC 750 on it.
BLAST is another telco board with a PowerPC 8260 on it.  The code is provided
in case anyone wants to port to those PPC (or any other PPC) chips.

	Sape

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Richard Miller]

I've also got 4th edition Plan 9 running on the ipengine, which is
based on the PowerPC 823.  I believe you can still buy those -
see http://www.brightstareng.com/ine1.htm for info.

I'm happy to contribute the port, but I should merge it with the other
ones in ppc first.

-- Richard

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[plan9]

> I believe you can still buy those -
> see http://www.brightstareng.com/ine1.htm for info.
> 

895$ for a 50MHz PPC... compared to Viaduct equivalent
which was told to be ~50$ ?

Isn't it expensive if you want n * Plan 9 CPUs ?

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Charles Forsyth]

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i've not unearthed low-quantity prices for powerpc single-board
systems that are anywhere near $50.   i'd be delighted
to know where to find ones priced at even thrice that
or a little more.

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From: "plan9@itic.ca" <plan9@itic.ca>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] power pc port
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 08:59:48 GMT
Message-ID: <7458b557.0308020824.79388072@posting.google.com>

> I believe you can still buy those -
> see http://www.brightstareng.com/ine1.htm for info.
> 

895$ for a 50MHz PPC... compared to Viaduct equivalent
which was told to be ~50$ ?

Isn't it expensive if you want n * Plan 9 CPUs ?

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[ron minnich]

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, plan9@itic.ca wrote:

> 895$ for a 50MHz PPC... compared to Viaduct equivalent
> which was told to be ~50$ ?

yeah, that is the "PPC problem". They're always about 10x over on
price/performance. You can get for ca. $150 today a 1 GHZ VIA C3 mobo --
much nicer.

ron

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Richard Miller]

> yeah, that is the "PPC problem". They're always about 10x over on
> price/performance. You can get for ca. $150 today a 1 GHZ VIA C3 mobo --
> much nicer.

I agree that the single-quantity price for the ipengine-1 is very
high, but you're not comparing like with like.  The ipengine isn't
meant to be a generic desktop PC motherboard.  It's the size of a
credit card, has an integrated FPGA and lots of programmable I/O pins,
and comes with reasonably good hardware docs including schematics ..
all useful for designing / prototyping a special-purpose embedded
system.  Also the one-off price includes case and power supply, so
it's usable as a complete (fanless, diskless - i.e.  dead silent)
computer, if your application fits in the 4MB onboard flash.

If Plan 9 is a bit of a tight squeeze, you can get Inferno from
Vita Nuova (which served as a useful reference for the original
Plan 9 ipengine implementation - thanks, Charles!).

Aside: do our international readers know what "Chinese whispers" are?

-- Richard

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[northern snowfall]

>
>
>Aside: do our international readers know what "Chinese whispers" are?
>
I do, and since I'm across the pond I suppose
you can consider us Yanks as international
readers. :-P

Don

http://www.7f.no-ip.com/~north_

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Dan Cross]

> Aside: do our international readers know what "Chinese whispers" are?

I have no idea....

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[C H Forsyth]

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google knows

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From: Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] power pc port
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 08:53:01 -0400
Message-ID: <200308051253.h75Cr1706206@augusta.math.psu.edu>

> Aside: do our international readers know what "Chinese whispers" are?

I have no idea....

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[northern snowfall]

>
>
>I have no idea....
>
Aside international readers to the Chinese whisper?

Don

http://www.7f.no-ip.com/~north_

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[northern snowfall]

> Aside international readers to the Chinese whisper?

Mistyped due to hurry *wink*:
    Aside international readers, do the Chinese whisper?

Don

http://www.7f.no-ip.com/~north_

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[boyd, rounin]

> Aside: do our international readers know what "Chinese whispers" are?

i do

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[andrey mirtchovski]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Richard Miller wrote:

> Aside: do our international readers know what "Chinese whispers" are?
>

on the other side of the iron curtain (where the chinese were at the time
too!) it was known as 'broken telephone'. we used to play it in
kindergarden. then again, we used to sing songs about how bad atomic bombs
are and how the Party is our mother (and the russian Party was the mother in
law, i guess :)

http://www.wordreference.com/english/definition.asp?en=Chinese+whispers

what remains unknown is the connotation -- good or bad?

andrey

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Dan Cross]

> on the other side of the iron curtain (where the chinese were at the time
> too!) it was known as 'broken telephone'. we used to play it in
> kindergarden. then again, we used to sing songs about how bad atomic bombs
> are and how the Party is our mother (and the russian Party was the mother in
> law, i guess :)
>
> http://www.wordreference.com/english/definition.asp?en=Chinese+whispers

Oh, *that*!  We used to play that when I was a kid, too; I never knew it
had a name.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Philippe Anel]

At 09:56 05/08/03 -0400, you wrote:
> > on the other side of the iron curtain (where the chinese were at the time
> > too!) it was known as 'broken telephone'. we used to play it in
> > kindergarden. then again, we used to sing songs about how bad atomic bombs
> > are and how the Party is our mother (and the russian Party was the
> mother in
> > law, i guess :)
> >
> > http://www.wordreference.com/english/definition.asp?en=Chinese+whispers
>
>Oh, *that*!  We used to play that when I was a kid, too; I never knew it
>had a name.

In french : "le telephone arabe" :)

         Philippe

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[okamoto]

> Oh, *that*!  We used to play that when I was a kid, too; I never knew it
> had a name.

Me, too.

Kenji

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[northern snowfall]

>
>
>what remains unknown is the connotation -- good or bad?
>
Considering Mr. Miller's context, I'd say bad.
....awaiting snappy Boyd comment ;-D

Don

http://www.7f.no-ip.com/~north_

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[a]

in my youth (*ahem* more recent than most here, i'd guess) we simply
called it "telephone". i'd assumed from the name it was the same game,
although the etymology (entemology? the one that isn't about bugs) is
curious. i believe "telephone" is a (the?) widely understood name for
the game in American grade schoolers.
ア

[9fans] plan9 on Ati Mobility M/M1, HP Omnibook 6000

[FODEMESI Gergely]

Hi,

 today I tried to boot the latest downloaded disk on an HP Omnibook 6000,
with an Ati Mobility M/M1 graphic chip in a laptop store.
The kernel recognised everything, but after switching from text to
graphics the screen went blank, and I couldn't reboot it with (ctrl ttr).

Does this sound like an easily resolvable problem, or the driver
recognising the chip just won't drive the screen?

Spec:
PIII 850Mhz (SpeedStep?)
256MB RAM
20GB disk
15" SXGA+ TFT

I've browsed through the archives, but I could hardly find any references
to a similar (same?) graphic chip (Compaq Armada).

It'd be rather cheap (about $780)

 thanks: gergo

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[David Presotto]

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They are machines built by Lucent for the inside of cellular
stations.  Not likely that you'll ever see one.  However,
the port may be arbitrarily close to other ppc's that you
might find, making a port to those machines a bit easier.

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From: "plan9@itic.ca" <plan9@itic.ca>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] power pc port
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 09:02:28 GMT
Message-ID: <7458b557.0307311450.6cdfef9d@posting.google.com>

presotto@closedmind.org (David Presotto) wrote in message news:<4b5afb74f399e57bd8c123746c233c27@plan9.bell-labs.com>...
> Arghh.  As people pointed out, /sys/src/9/power is a bad choice because it
> clashes with the old sgi stuff that we don't support but others might still
> be using.  I renamed it to /sys/src/9/ppc.
> --

The question was : what are those 2 new machines that support Plan 9 ?
Where can we buy them ?

PS : It is annoying to see how some people avoid some subjects...

Platform	Publicly available			Kernel Status

Intel x86		YES				actively supported
SGI			Yes				discontinued
NeXT			Yes				discontinued
Gnot			???				discontinued
Viaduct			NO				discontinued
SparcStation		YES				discontinued
Bitsy (ARM)		YES				merely supported
AlphaPC			YES				merely supported
Magnum			YES				discontinued

UCU			???				????????????
BLAST			???				????????????

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Christopher Nielsen]

> From: "plan9@itic.ca" <plan9@itic.ca>
>
> Platform	Publicly available			Kernel Status
>
> SGI			Yes				discontinued

AFAIK, SGI isn't publicly available. The last time I tried
wrestling with SGI about it, they "poltely declined" to
approve release of the source.

--
Christopher Nielsen
"They who can give up essential liberty for temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[plan9]

> AFAIK, SGI isn't publicly available. The last time I tried
> wrestling with SGI about it, they "poltely declined" to
> approve release of the source.


Right (I forgot that) ! That came from R2 which had diferent
license. Looking at the kernel code, it was VERY far from R4.

The init code might be helpfull. For the kernel itself, that 
may be a best bet to find the hardware specifications (if any).

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Christopher Nielsen]

There's a lot of proprietary hardware inside the older SGIs.
And I think you'd be hard pressed to find any documentation.
IANAL, but I would think that implementing a kernel after
looking at 2ed code would violate the license. Personally,
I wouldn't risk it.

Just my $0.02

On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 08:59:35AM +0000, plan9@itic.ca wrote:
> > AFAIK, SGI isn't publicly available. The last time I tried
> > wrestling with SGI about it, they "poltely declined" to
> > approve release of the source.
>
>
> Right (I forgot that) ! That came from R2 which had diferent
> license. Looking at the kernel code, it was VERY far from R4.
>
> The init code might be helpfull. For the kernel itself, that
> may be a best bet to find the hardware specifications (if any).

--
Christopher Nielsen
"They who can give up essential liberty for temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[plan9]

> IANAL, but I would think that implementing a kernel after
> looking at 2ed code would violate the license. Personally,
> I wouldn't risk it.
> 
> Just my $0.02
> 

R2 source code has something I never saw again and which is
so good for understanding : almost perfectly commented.

Now if you mean snarf/paste that may constitute 
a severe infrigment. People not beeing able to
understand such an asset are probably not capable
of resurrecting the SGI port nor any other port ;-)

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Charles Forsyth]

> AFAIK, SGI isn't publicly available. The last time I tried
> wrestling with SGI about it, they "poltely declined" to
> approve release of the source.

	...

>There's a lot of proprietary hardware inside the older SGIs.
>And I think you'd be hard pressed to find any documentation.

the silly thing is that there are or were linux ports
to several of the SGI devices that ran Plan 9 (and some others). certainly
i've got a copy of such a linux where the files are dated 1998.
if you've got the energy (which i suppose you might
if you've got the incentive of owning the appropriate hardware) you might
find an intelligent human being at SGI who will understand
that if linux exists for it, it is pointless preventing release of Plan 9
source for the same hardware.  unless, of course, they
are particularly astute and are trying to preven the
release of a readable system for that hardware.

alternatively, you could use the Linux code as a guide
to driving the hardware and re-port Plan 9.
it will be hard in the case of l.s and mmu.c because
Linux ever has had, as far as i can tell from arm and powerpc ports,
a remarkably x86-based approach to MMU
handling and Plan 9 takes a quite different approach,
especially on the multiprocessors.

it's a shame because the code in /sys/src/9/power/mmu.c
is a delight: clean multiprocessor mmu handling by wielding
logic (eg, carefully worked out invariants) rather than
sledgehammers (eg, interprocessor traps, locks and signals).
i used a variant on the bebox for that reason.
that code isn't SGIs.  i thought it was a good example to study
in an OS class.

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[ron minnich]

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Charles Forsyth wrote:

> if you've got the energy (which i suppose you might
> if you've got the incentive of owning the appropriate hardware) you might
> find an intelligent human being at SGI who will understand

there's the problem. The people who have to make this decision are
probably either (1) laid off, or even worse, (2) lawyers. So much for
intelligent life.

I should tell you the K7 story sometime.

ron

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[David Presotto]

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Unfair! Lawyers are a lot smarter than we are.  And they're minimalists too;
the answer to all questions is 'no'.

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From: ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] power pc port
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 08:19:45 -0600 (MDT)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0308040818520.29899-100000@maxroach.lanl.gov>

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Charles Forsyth wrote:

> if you've got the energy (which i suppose you might
> if you've got the incentive of owning the appropriate hardware) you might
> find an intelligent human being at SGI who will understand

there's the problem. The people who have to make this decision are
probably either (1) laid off, or even worse, (2) lawyers. So much for
intelligent life.

I should tell you the K7 story sometime.

ron

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Jack Johnson]

David Presotto wrote:
> Unfair! Lawyers are a lot smarter than we are.  And they're minimalists too;
> the answer to all questions is 'no'.

I think they're reductionists.

"Can I make money off this?"

-Jack

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Jack Johnson]

Charles Forsyth wrote:
> i used a variant on the bebox for that reason.

Sorry to be a pest, but any chance of the bebox port seeing the light of
day?  Dead hardware line, dead OS line, it would be nice to keep it
chugging along.

-Jack

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[C H Forsyth]

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yes, once i manage to copy the essential boot diskette

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From: Jack Johnson <fragment@nas.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] power pc port
Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2003 07:42:11 -0700
Message-ID: <3F2E70C3.4030804@nas.com>

Charles Forsyth wrote:
> i used a variant on the bebox for that reason.

Sorry to be a pest, but any chance of the bebox port seeing the light of
day?  Dead hardware line, dead OS line, it would be nice to keep it
chugging along.

-Jack

Re: [9fans] power pc port

[Charles Forsyth]

i've got a 2nd edition(!) powerpc port for the dual processor 603/603e bebox.
if you've got a Bebox from e-bay and you unaccountably have got time
to spare to try to update it, let me know ...
it's actually the first powerpc port and the cause of q[acl]'s existence, so
just for fun i diff'd parts of it against the current release and
it was interesting to see an effect similar to Chinese whispers.