[9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[Bakul Shah]

Installing plan9 under qemu takes a long time (3+ hours) but
once installed, it works well.  Its performance is good
enough for real work if the kqemu kernel module is used.

I did notice a few strange things.

- some basic timing seems to be messed up.  sleep <n>
  blocks for roughly <n>/10 of real time (but not always --
  `time sleep <n>' is more like <n>/7).

- date seems to flip between current time and jan 2 2000
  without any discernible pattern.

- occasionally the display goes blank and you have to click
  somewhere in the plan9 screen to refresh it.

Other oses under qemu do not have these problems.

More on installation:

To speed up the installation I have tried various tricks
(including installing on a memory disk) but nothing made any
real difference.

I just tried this again:

	qemu-img create plan9.disk 4G
	qemu -cdrom plan9.iso -boot d plan9.disk

This time I chose fossil+venti.  Clearing a 3GB venti arena
happens very fast, at a rate of 10+ MBps, but the copydist
step took 3:24 hours on a 2.4GHz celeron!  I do not see such
speed problems with other OSes under qemu.

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[Roman Shaposhnick]

On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 03:45:46PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> Installing plan9 under qemu takes a long time (3+ hours) 

  It was even longer in my case (5+ hours) which makes me
  wonder if there's a chance of making preinstalled disk
  images of plan9 under qemu available for a generic consumption,
  so that others do not have to waste that much time.

> I just tried this again:
> 
> 	qemu-img create plan9.disk 4G
> 	qemu -cdrom plan9.iso -boot d plan9.disk

  How do you boot once Plan9 gets installed ? I had to resort to
  floppy disk boot, because it didn't really want to boot
  from a freshly installed HDD image.

Thanks,
Roman.

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[Bakul Shah]

> > Installing plan9 under qemu takes a long time (3+ hours) 
> 
>   It was even longer in my case (5+ hours) which makes me
>   wonder if there's a chance of making preinstalled disk
>   images of plan9 under qemu available for a generic consumption,
>   so that others do not have to waste that much time.

I can supply image or two if people are interested but it
will need to be copied to a site with a fatter pipe.

Plan9/qemu file write speed is less than 1MBps while
freebsd/qemu does over 10MBps (the host give me 50MBps for
file writes).  So I hope there is a right `hack' that can
help improve disk speed quite a bit + speed up install.  But
it will take me a while to come up to speed to do this.

> > I just tried this again:
> > 
> > 	qemu-img create plan9.disk 4G
> > 	qemu -cdrom plan9.iso -boot d plan9.disk
> 
>   How do you boot once Plan9 gets installed ? I had to resort to
>   floppy disk boot, because it didn't really want to boot
>   from a freshly installed HDD image.

During one of the earlier steps I installed mbr, and chose
`boot from plan9' option.  But I didn't do anything special.

May be you are using an earlier version of qemu which had
some problems.  I am running qemu-0.7.0 from ports + hand
built kqemu (but
	cd /usr/ports/emulators/qemu && make -DWITH_KQEMU
should also work).  Note that under FreeBSD you *must*
rebuild kqemu if you rebuild the kernel.

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[Roman Shaposhnick]

On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 04:11:11PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> > > Installing plan9 under qemu takes a long time (3+ hours) 
> > 
> >   It was even longer in my case (5+ hours) which makes me
> >   wonder if there's a chance of making preinstalled disk
> >   images of plan9 under qemu available for a generic consumption,
> >   so that others do not have to waste that much time.
> 
> I can supply image or two if people are interested but it
> will need to be copied to a site with a fatter pipe.

  Actually I was talking more about putting these images
  onto http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist.

  I'd wait for somebody from the labs to comment on that.

Thanks,
Roman.

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[boyd, rounin]

>  Actually I was talking more about putting these images
>  onto http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist.

nah, put 'em in /n/sources/contrib/<you>/... and add a link from the wiki.
--
MGRS 31U DQ 52572 12604

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[Tim Newsham]

> nah, put 'em in /n/sources/contrib/<you>/... and add a link from the wiki.

Hmm.. might take longer than the install time to download it
from sources :)  I'm not sure what other people's experiences
are like, but I dont get very high bandwidth from sources.

The Free Operating Systems Zoo might be a good place to host
an image:  http://www.freeoszoo.org/

Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[Russ Cox]

If you use fcp instead of cp it might work faster.

Russ

On 5/27/05, Tim Newsham <newsham@lava.net> wrote:
> > nah, put 'em in /n/sources/contrib/<you>/... and add a link from the wiki.
> 
> Hmm.. might take longer than the install time to download it
> from sources :)  I'm not sure what other people's experiences
> are like, but I dont get very high bandwidth from sources.
> 
> The Free Operating Systems Zoo might be a good place to host
> an image:  http://www.freeoszoo.org/
> 
> Tim Newsham
> http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
>

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[bakul+plan9]

> The Free Operating Systems Zoo might be a good place to host
> an image:  http://www.freeoszoo.org/

this won't violate the plan9 licence in any way?

having a freely available image + qemu will allow a lot more
people to experiment with plan9 but the time to install and
get everything right is daunting.

is there is a console based installation?  if so one can
create a script that automates all the steps.  hmm....
actually this may already be (painfully) possible -- one can
feed qemu individual keystrokes.  now where did i misplace my
free time?

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

[William Josephson]

On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 03:45:46PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> This time I chose fossil+venti.  Clearing a 3GB venti arena
> happens very fast, at a rate of 10+ MBps, but the copydist
> step took 3:24 hours on a 2.4GHz celeron!  I do not see such
> speed problems with other OSes under qemu.

Clearly you have not tried installing Windows XP SP 2.

Re: [9fans] FYI: plan9 on qemu on freebsd

["Nils O. Selåsdal"]

Roman Shaposhnick wrote:
> On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 03:45:46PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> 
>>Installing plan9 under qemu takes a long time (3+ hours) 
> 
> 
>   It was even longer in my case (5+ hours) which makes me
>   wonder if there's a chance of making preinstalled disk
>   images of plan9 under qemu available for a generic consumption,
>   so that others do not have to waste that much time.
I have a 512Mb hdimage of a fresh install at
http://asgaard.homelinux.org/plan9/Plan9-hdimage.gz
(also at http://www.9grid.de/plan9/Plan9-hdimage.gz)
uncompress and run qemu -boot c -hda Plan9-hdimage

(Should the above distribution of these image conflict
with any license clauses I'm not aware of, let me know...)
-- 
Nils O. Selåsdal
www.utelsystems.com