[9fans] Plan 9 On Parallels

[9fans] Plan 9 On Parallels

[Anant Narayanan]

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

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 On Parallels

[andrey mirtchovski]

I have no problems with parallels and plan9 . i started with david's
changes initially but recompiled a brand new kernel just today (after
a source update) which runs just fine.

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 On Parallels

[Anant Narayanan]

andrey mirtchovski wrote:
> I have no problems with parallels and plan9 . i started with david's
> changes initially but recompiled a brand new kernel just today (after
> a source update) which runs just fine.

I just downloaded a fresh ISO and installed it. The ethernet card still
does not appear to be detected. (I'm looking for /dev/ether0). I still
get the error on bootup:

pcirouting: Cannot find south bridge PCI.0.0.0

the same as before.

Either you're still using your old kernel, or I'm missing something
fundamental...

Regards,
-- 
Anant

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 On Parallels

[Anant Narayanan]

Anant Narayanan wrote:
> I just downloaded a fresh ISO and installed it. The ethernet card still
> does not appear to be detected. (I'm looking for /dev/ether0). I still
> get the error on bootup:

I meant /net/ether0. Sorry.

--
Anant

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 On Parallels

[David Leimbach]

On 5/30/07, andrey mirtchovski <mirtchovski@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have no problems with parallels and plan9 . i started with david's
> changes initially but recompiled a brand new kernel just today (after
> a source update) which runs just fine.
>

For the record, they're not my changes but jmk's...  I believe if one
were to recompile with those same changes to this day it would still
work, but I abandoned my parallels setup for the time being since I
set up a real Plan 9 box.

I've not tried to rebuild with those changes again.  I think I
successfully added my parallels config stuff to the Plan 9 wiki.

I still can't access my mordor account though...

Re: [9fans] Plan 9 On Parallels

[David Leimbach]

On 5/30/07, David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/30/07, andrey mirtchovski <mirtchovski@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have no problems with parallels and plan9 . i started with david's
> > changes initially but recompiled a brand new kernel just today (after
> > a source update) which runs just fine.
> >
>
> For the record, they're not my changes but jmk's...  I believe if one
> were to recompile with those same changes to this day it would still
> work, but I abandoned my parallels setup for the time being since I
> set up a real Plan 9 box.
>
> I've not tried to rebuild with those changes again.  I think I
> successfully added my parallels config stuff to the Plan 9 wiki.
>
> I still can't access my mordor account though...
>

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Installing_in_Parallels_Desktop_on_Mac_OS_X/index.html