[9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[Paulo Pocinho]

Hello.

I have trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD.
When Plan 9 is booting, it hangs after this:

boot from: sdD1!cdboot!9pcflop.gz
found 9pcflop.gz
.gz... ... ...1209674
=> 803921 + 1043600 + 130816 = 1978337
entry: f0100020

Plan 9
_


With some help from #plan9, I realized it's likely a hardware compatibility
issue and the problem is in the kernel.

My machine is a core2duo notebook with an i945 chip set.

The IDE controller is:

00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA
Storage Controller IDE (rev 02) (prog-if 80 [Master])

With the PCI id:

00:1f.2 0101: 8086:27c4 (rev 02)

Despite the fact that this IDE/SATA controller is not stated in the hardware
compatibility page, I've been told that support for it had been recently added.

There are people who can boot Plan 9 successfully in similar hardware.

The only difference found so far relies in the revision number of the
controller. People that can run Plan 9 have revision 01 while my hardware
specs have revision 02.

Feel free to ask for further information to help me get Plan 9 running.


(Thanks to johnnybuoy and ality from #plan9 for the startup (and uriel, for the
"welcome" in the Plan9 community)).

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[erik quanstrom]

i'm not sure you can blame the ide/sata controller for this problem.
you're failing before cpuidprint() in main.c so interrupts haven't even
been enabled.  you might try *nomp=1 in your plan9.ini file.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[Paulo Pocinho]

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I'm using a cd image from 30th June.
I don't know if these are the right files, but:

The contents of

/sys/lib/dist/pc/plan9.ini.cd

and

/sys/lib/dist/pc/plan9.ini

both have the argument *nomp=1. Seems to be standard.

Is there a possibility to boot from a usb drive? If so, how?
I lack the floppy drive to make a customized boot.

In the case I don't have that possibility, how do I change the cd
image to alter plan9.ini contents and make it bootable again?

On 05/07/07, erik quanstrom <quanstro@coraid.com> wrote:
>
> i'm not sure you can blame the ide/sata controller for this problem.
> you're failing before cpuidprint() in main.c so interrupts haven't even
> been enabled.  you might try *nomp=1 in your plan9.ini file.
>
> - erik
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1241 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[Paulo Pocinho]

I've downloaded the floppy image, did dd if=plan9.flp of=/dev/usbstick ...
... and managed to edit the contents of plan9.ini.

However, after booting from the usb memory stick it complained about
finding plan9.ini and told me it was an invalid fat filesystem.

I backed up the contents from the stick, did a FAT16 reformat and it still
complained about it being an invalid filesystem.

Any hints?

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[erik quanstrom]

the problem is not the usb stick, but the fact that plan 9 does not recognize
the usb stick as a floppy disk as it is not using the bios calls.  it is the bios calls
that map requests to the floppy disk and map them to the usb.

thus 9load cannot find plan9.ini.

the easy (but oh-so-wrong) might be to have 9load stay in 16bit mode long
enough to probe the "floppy" for plan9.ini.  and stick it someplace useful
before branching running 9load proper.

a better but more involved fix might be to switch to 16bit mode and call bios
for floppy access.  this is more complicated but could pave the way for 9load
using universal drivers (part of the pxe standard) to load the kernel proper
instead of modified versions of the cpu kernel drivers.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[Jack Johnson]

On 7/7/07, erik quanstrom <quanstro@coraid.com> wrote:
> a better but more involved fix might be to switch to 16bit mode and call bios
> for floppy access.  this is more complicated but could pave the way for 9load
> using universal drivers (part of the pxe standard) to load the kernel proper
> instead of modified versions of the cpu kernel drivers.

Thinking about how some of the other platforms handle it, and even
other OSes on x86, has anyone looked at trying to leverage a different
bootloader?  Something like grub, maybe?

-Jack

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[Jack Johnson]

This makes a good read, too:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Replacing_9load/index.html

-Jack

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[erik quanstrom]

i didn't intend to start that thread.  especially since i don't have
time to do too much with 9load right now.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[Paulo Pocinho]

> http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Replacing_9load/index.html

I am motivated to take the effort and help on this possibility.
However, there is a problem ("chicken and egg") since I can't boot it.
Xen (or QEMU) could provide a reasonable environment to work with Plan9, though.
If there is someone willing to help, please let me know.

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[erik quanstrom]

r
On Sat Jul  7 21:19:33 EDT 2007, knapjack@gmail.com wrote:
> Thinking about how some of the other platforms handle it, and even
> other OSes on x86, has anyone looked at trying to leverage a different
> bootloader?  Something like grub, maybe?
> 
> -Jack

this won't work.

remember the whole problem is reading plan9.ini
the cpu kernel expects 9load to find plan9.ini, interact with the
user and put the results at a particular location in memory.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Trouble starting Plan9 Installation and Live CD

[tlaronde]

On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 09:00:36PM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
> the problem is not the usb stick, but the fact that plan 9 does not recognize
> the usb stick as a floppy disk as it is not using the bios calls.  it is the bios calls
> that map requests to the floppy disk and map them to the usb.
> 
> thus 9load cannot find plan9.ini.

I may be wrong, but I think that in this very case the usb stick is
considered as a hard drive, and should have a MBR. dd'ing the floppy on
a "hard drive" is unlikeky to give correct result since the FAT table
may be not on the right sector (if a MBR is expected, the partition
table in this case will be garbage)?


>From your remarks and after a cursory look to the sources in boot/ it
seems that when I suggested, in another thread, to type fd0!9pcflop.gz
(for El Torito) I was wrong since the BIOS services are not used after
the PBS, and this is a BIOS trick. But then I'm a bit puzzled about the
"fd0 sd0" print for choices for the files (unless the "boot" device
is always reported in the list, and since fd0 was given as the boot
device by the BIOS for use in PBS). Well this means that I have to study
more carefully the code before giving advices...

Mea maxima culpa.
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                 http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C