[9fans] iso experiment

[9fans] iso experiment

[erik quanstrom]

i've suggested using my contrib/sd to a few people
who are having trouble with sd devices.  unfortunately,
it's hard to apply patches without a working system.  so
as an experiment i built a cd that differs from the cd
on sources only in the kernel and 9load and plan9.ini used.
everything else is the same.  (so if you rebuild the kernel,
you'll get a different kernel; you'll need to apply paches
yourself.)

as a further experiment, 9load has been modified so
that it should Just Work from any supported sd boot
device.  9load actually knows the device it booted from.
"bootdev" stands in for the boot device.  as in
bootdev!cdboot!9pcflop.gz

if this doesn't work for anybody, i'll remove it.  and
in any event, this an experiment, not a solution.

ftp://ftp.quanstro.net/other/9atom.iso.bz2

one with (very noisy) ata probe debugging turned on is at

ftp://ftp.quanstro.net/other/9atomdbg.iso.bz2

- erik

Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[Benjamin Huntsman]

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>i've suggested using my contrib/sd to a few people
>who are having trouble with sd devices

I was one of those people, and I must say, the sd drivers work great and seem to offer a degree of flexibility that the 
Why not just incorporate them into the "official" distribution?

-Ben

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Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[Benjamin Huntsman]

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Oops... looks like I forgot to finish my thought:

I was one of those people, and I must say, the sd drivers work great and seem to offer a degree of flexibility that the "stock" driver does not.
Why not just incorporate them into the "official" distribution?

-Ben


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Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[David Leimbach]

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On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Benjamin Huntsman <
BHuntsman@mail2.cu-portland.edu> wrote:

> Oops... looks like I forgot to finish my thought:
>
> I was one of those people, and I must say, the sd drivers work great and
> seem to offer a degree of flexibility that the "stock" driver does not.
> Why not just incorporate them into the "official" distribution?
>
> -Ben
>
>
I downloaded it just to try a differerent 9load on my machine before I
commit to getting another one.  Atom seems the way to go though, and I
suppose this iso may work well with a particular atom
config (just assuming based on the filename).

Dave

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Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[Steve Simon]

Ok,

Your iso image boots OK, however the kernel still doesn't see PATA.

The iso boots off PATA, 9load finds and reads plan9.ini, it fails
to find the kernel (because it is looking on sdD0), if I type the
kernel path in by hand then it loads the kernel as you would expect.

I tried your bootdev device but that didn't seem to work I'am afriad.

Sorry to be the bringer of unexciting tidings.

as an aside, I am just trying a hack to kbd.c to reset numloc and
speed up the keyboard repeat speed at powerup as I have a nice small
keyboard but it always powers up with numloc enabled on plan9 and I
cannot turn it off (teh numlock key has no effect).

-Steve

Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[erik quanstrom]

> Your iso image boots OK, however the kernel still doesn't see PATA.

mine does.  so we have to figure out what we're doing wrong with
your hardware, or decide that there's something wrong.

> The iso boots off PATA, 9load finds and reads plan9.ini, it fails
> to find the kernel (because it is looking on sdD0), if I type the
> kernel path in by hand then it loads the kernel as you would expect.

the debug kernel doesn't have the modified plan9.ini.  i was too lazy
to recreate it.

> as an aside, I am just trying a hack to kbd.c to reset numloc and
> speed up the keyboard repeat speed at powerup as I have a nice small
> keyboard but it always powers up with numloc enabled on plan9 and I
> cannot turn it off (teh numlock key has no effect).

ah, yes.  i have a fix for that from the sr kernel.  unfortunately, i need
to extract the part of that fix that hammers the mouse port.  sam really
tore his hair out on that one.

give me a bit, if you don't mind.  i'd send you a good model m keyboard,
but shipping might be a bit much.

- erik

Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[erik quanstrom]

>mine does.  so we have to figure out what we're doing wrong with
>your hardware, or decide that there's something wrong [with your
hardware].

there, fixed that for me.

- erik

Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[Steve Simon]

Ok, I'al try my keyboard mod and I
borrowed a DVDROM drive from work, just to see
if that works any better.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[Steve Simon]

Appologies for the noise everyone.

Re: [9fans] iso experiment

[erik quanstrom]

> I was one of those people, and I must say, the sd drivers work great and seem to offer a degree of flexibility that the "stock" driver does not.
> Why not just incorporate them into the "official" distribution?

i'm glad it works for you.  thanks for the feedback.  i appreciate
all feedback good or bad.  and it is invaluable, since i have a
limited amount of hardware.  as far as i know right now, there
aren't any regressions from the distribution.

the contrib sd stuff was done to satisfy my need for raw ata commands,
and to incorporate a wierd new driver that does ata, packet io ata
and sas, depending on what kind of drive you plug in.  then it was
easier to make bug fixes to my version.

unfortunately, i didn't do the coordination i should have due to
time pressure.  so, now the problem for me is convincing folks that
(a) updating sd is a good idea and (b) my updates are the right ones.
i'm optimistic this will happen, but it may take some time.

- erik