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

[Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@BitBlocks.com>]

> > 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.