From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@9fans.net From: "Russ Cox" Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:56:31 -0400 In-Reply-To: <2569182B-34B8-4625-BCD2-10B5D17D4F18@mac.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20080422205844.137A71E8C4D@holo.morphisms.net> Subject: Re: [9fans] QEMU and Venti Topicbox-Message-UUID: 980e2bf2-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > Hello. Someone just told me the fault on why QEMU crashes every time I > boot Plan 9 -- venti. With a fossil only system, everything worked > without a hitch -- until that corrupt root entry fiasco which cost me > a book I was writing, a troff preprocessor (eg, for graphing > equations), my extensions to hoc(1), and other items. So I went to > fossil+venti, suffered several crashes on Tiger but little else, then > went to Leopard to find out that it always crashed. So I'll go back to > fossil-only and be locked in prayer that it doesn't happen again. Prayer is one option; backups are a better one. Normally I'm quite sympathetic to stories about losing files, but ultimately, you have to take responsibility for your own actions. You chose to trust the only copy of your important files to a single disk, without backups. Further, you picked a system that you had little to no experience using and no reason to believe would run reliably. You made a giant chain of possible single points of failure -- fossil, venti, QEMU, OS X, your disk -- and assumed that none of them would fail. But one did. Losing data always sucks, but you set yourself up for it. Fossil and venti have had their share of bugs, and if I thought you had run into one, I would be working hard to find and fix it. But right now, all evidence points to QEMU or hardware errors. It is entirely believable that QEMU does crash when running venti -- I've crashed it doing many things -- but that doesn't imply that venti is broken. It implies that QEMU is broken. If you want to run Plan 9 reliably, find a way to do it on a more reliable set up, one that doesn't include QEMU. Russ