[9fans] Plan 9 On Parallels

[Anant Narayanan <anant@kix.in>]

Hi everyone,

I know this has been discussed a couple of times on the list; but the
current situation is that Plan 9 is unable to detect an ethernet card
when run on the Parallels [1] Virtual Machine for Mac OS X.

Parallels emulates a standard NE2000 clone (RTL8029 to be precise),
which Plan 9 supports. This issue was apparently analyzed some time ago,
the conclusion of which was that Parallels does not allow direct PCI bus
scanning, which results in Plan 9 being unable to detect the ethernet
card. Some patches [2] were released to correct this, but these set of
patches do not work with the current Plan 9 sources (as of May 22, 2007)
- they even fail to compile.

Upon diff'ing the patches with the official Plan 9 sources it seems that
some of it has already been incorporated into the mainstream sources. I
even see this comment in /sys/src/9/pc/ether2000.c:

"Parallels has buf[0x0E] == 0x00 whereas real hardware usually has 0x57."

which seems to indicate that Plan 9 does support direct PCI bus scanning
(or whatever, I am not familiar with device-driver programming!); but
the fact is that it does not.

I am sure that a lot of us will be really grateful if this issue is
fixed. Parallels provides excellent performance on the Mac OS X and is
really the only option for the most of us on Intel Macs. Needless to
say, I am willing to provide whatever support is required in terms of
testing to fix this issue.

Cheers,
-- 
Anant Narayanan

[1] http://http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/sr/ (See table
for Guest Hardware Specifications)
[2] http://www.tip9ug.jp/who/leimy/parallels.html