[9fans] Once again: running Plan 9 under VMWare, Bochs, Plex86 etc.

[9fans] Once again: running Plan 9 under VMWare, Bochs, Plex86 etc.

[Tomas]

Hello,

Having looked through that 15MB mailing list archive file, I'm
wondering if there has been any recent progress in getting Plan 9
to run through Bochs, Plex86 or (preferably) VMWare, or any other
emulator. Last time I saw this mentioned, Russ Cox was working on
getting it to work under VMWare. What's the current status?

It seems it'll take months before I get the spare hardware to do
a "real" Plan 9 install, and in the meantime I'd like to play
with the system to get a feel for it.

Sorry to be the one bringing this old topic up, but I really want
to try the system out.

/Tomas

Re: [9fans] Once again: running Plan 9 under VMWare, Bochs, Plex86 etc.

[Vincent van Gelderen]

Wednesday, October 03, 2001, 9:48:02 AM, you wrote:
T> Hello,

T> Having looked through that 15MB mailing list archive file, I'm
T> wondering if there has been any recent progress in getting Plan 9
T> to run through Bochs, Plex86 or (preferably) VMWare, or any other
T> emulator. Last time I saw this mentioned, Russ Cox was working on
T> getting it to work under VMWare. What's the current status?

T> It seems it'll take months before I get the spare hardware to do
T> a "real" Plan 9 install, and in the meantime I'd like to play
T> with the system to get a feel for it.

T> Sorry to be the one bringing this old topic up, but I really want
T> to try the system out.

T> /Tomas

        I found the installation under Virtual PC relatively
        painless. Minuses: it took long to install, and the
        ethernet doesn't work.

        http://www.home.zonnet.nl/v-i-n-z/
                     
-- 
Best regards,
 Vincent                            mailto:v-i-n-z@zonnet.nl

Re: [9fans] Once again: running Plan 9 under VMWare, Bochs, Plex86 etc.

[Boyd Roberts]

>         I found the installation under Virtual PC relatively
>         painless. Minuses: it took long to install, and the
>         ethernet doesn't work.

long?  i installed '2000 for mate off cd.  it took 3 _hours_;
all that time was spent copying stuff off the cd.

long?  i was on hold, but with rio and sam i could continue
to work with _just_ the mouse.

Re: [9fans] Once again: running Plan 9 under VMWare, Bochs, Plex86 etc.

[Vincent van Gelderen]

On Wednesday, October 03, 2001, 12:35:24 PM, you wrote:
>>         I found the installation under Virtual PC relatively
>>         painless. Minuses: it took long to install, and the
>>         ethernet doesn't work.

BR> long?  i installed '2000 for mate off cd.  it took 3 _hours_;
BR> all that time was spent copying stuff off the cd.

BR> long?  i was on hold, but with rio and sam i could continue
BR> to work with _just_ the mouse.

    p9 took more than 4 hours to install under VPC. Iirc a
    normal install took 30-40 minutes (on the same hardware),
    so long seems a good word to use.

-- 
Best regards,
 Vincent                            mailto:v-i-n-z@zonnet.nl

Re: [9fans] Once again: running Plan 9 under VMWare, Bochs, Plex86 etc.

[Russ Cox]

I have the ethernet and the vga working under VMware, but
unfortunately VMware doesn't always provide a virtual hardware
cursor.  Since Plan 9 doesn't have software cursor code, we're
sort of stuck in that case.  Since this observation is based on a
sample of size one, I don't really know if VMware ever
provides a virtual hardware cursor.  I haven't done VGA
hardware acceleration yet either, which should help a lot
with the perceived speed, but that looks easy.

It is my current intention that the still-far-off next
release will have full VMware support, which is to say that
if nothing else happens first, the prospect of doing a new release
will be enough of a kick for me to write the missing bits of code.

When I did the VMware support, I changed aux/vga to
recognize cards based on PCI device identifiers (in addition
to the old BIOS-string method).  This should help quite a
bit with not having to edit vgadb for supported cards.

If people who already have the system installed would
like to play with running a CPU server under VMware, I will
make the ethernet driver available.  At least then you
could drawterm into your virtual CPU server.

Russ