[9fans] Returning to Plan 9: Virtualization, Distributions

[r.schuller@orgizm.net (Ruben Schuller)]

To throw my experiences in:

I've installed bell labs plan9 in qemu-kvm. What really sped up the
installation was having the disk image in a tmpfs, otherwise the
copying to the hard disk took hours. With tmpfs it was finished in some
minutes. After moving this image to the harddisk the plan9 system was
really slow, though. This also worked for 9front, which seemed to run
more smoothly with the image not in ram. Testing 9atom is to be done.

The environment for these tests is an archlinux system with an amd cpu
and 8G of ram.

Be aware that i've not tested networking, the installation was from the
iso.

Steps (also with 9front):
Installation:
$ mkdir tmp
$ sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=6G tmpfs tmp
$ qemu-img create tmp/plan9.img 2g
$ qemu-kvm -hda tmp/plan9.img -cdrom plan9.iso

After installation:
$ mv tmp/plan9.img .
$ sudo umount tmp
$ qemu-kvm -hda plan9.img

I hope this is of any use :)

Ruben