Re: [9fans] installing from 9vx?

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> I have a bit of free space at the beginning of my hard drive so I wanted
> to reinstall a native plan9 there, however installing from the iso (dled
> on 23/12/2008) fails for me. I get some I/O errors at the fmtfossil stage,
> such as those:
> sdE0: i/o error d0 @0
> sdE0: LLBA 312,581,808 sectors
>
> I suppose this happens because of some changes with the sata driver since
> I was able to install with the iso something like one year ago. I guess I
> could try to create an alternate iso with Erik's sdiahci but I figured
> I could try to install from 9vx first, if that's at all possible.

i just reviewed the changes on sources.  i don't see anything that
jumps out at me as a regression.  mainly u32int's were changed to
ulong and there are some locking fixes.  not likely your problem.
perhaps you were never using a driver from sources?  there are a
number of postitive changes in the current driver.  it's been in
production for a year or so and we've gotten a few fixes for esoteric
cases from that.  (there's nothing like a bad drive to ferret these
things out.) lucio also found that i had absolutely no idea what i was
doing with hbas that support Hsss (staggered spinup), at least for
ich9m-based thinkpads.  and i know there were some other folks who
helped me kick disks out of power-mgmt funks.

my current versions are:
/n/sources/contrib/quanstro/src/9/pc/^(ahci.h sdiahci.c).
/n/sources/contrib/quanstro/src/9loadaoe/^(ahci.h sdiahci.c).

by the way, since in the plan 9 world int ≡ 32 bits, why is it
customary to use ulong instead of uint for 32 bit values?
the reason for doing this probablly passed before kenc was
written.

- erik