[9fans] panic

[frank@inua.be (Frank Lenaerts)]

Hi,

Yesterday, I downloaded the Plan 9 live CD and tried to boot it on a
Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic PC (which is about 2 years old). Unfortunately,
booting from the CD fails:

--- begin ---
...
<menu>
...
Plan 9
E820: ...
<several E820: lines>
panic: vmap: va=0xf0400000 pa=0x00400000 pde=0x00400083
panic: vmap: va=0xf0400000 pa=0x00400000 pde=0x00400083
dumpstack disabled
cpu0: exiting
---  end  ---

Not knowing where to start looking for the possible cause, I just
googled for the panic line and found a post in an old archive[*]. This
person mentions that in his case the everything seemed ok when
*noe820scan is specified. 

As this machine does not have a floppy drive and I do not want to burn
a new CD just to modify plan9.ini, I tried to boot the system using
PXE (from a Linux machine running a dhcp and tftp server). The
intention was to get 9pxeload to load a plan9.ini file from the Linux
machine and to then continue booting from the CD (i.e. trying to pass
the *noe820scan to the kernel).

To do this, I did the following:

- configured the dhcp server (MAC, filename...)
- put 9pxeload in place
- modified plan9.ini so that it contains *noe820scan and renamed it to
  the MAC address of the NIC

Booting the PC using PXE loads 9pxeload but the plan9.ini file is not
found:

--- begin ---
initial probe, to find plan9.ini...pcirouting: ...

Boot devices: fd0
boot from: 
---  end  ---

The 9load manpage says that the file should be put in /cfg/pxe (which
I then created under /tftpboot on the Linux box). I thought that
9pxeload would request /cfg/pxe/<MAC> using TFTP but even that does
not seem to be the case i.e. it seems as if 9pxeload doesn't request
any file using TFTP... Could somebody explain me how it is supposed to
work?

[*] http://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2006-July.txt


Kind regards,

-- 
Frank Lenaerts ---------------------------------------- frank@inua.be