[9fans] plan9 support for Intel i850e chip set

[9fans] plan9 support for Intel i850e chip set

[Lawrence E. Bakst]

I was thinking of buying a brand new PC for Christmas. A Dell with a
3.06 GHz P4 w/ 533 MHz FSB with HyperThreading, and the Intel i850e
support chips which has a dual channnel 1066 RDRAM  memory system. I
need this config for some software based real time video editing
software we've been developing at work, but I really want to be able
to run plan9 on it as well. A few questions:

1. Will plan9 run on this config? I did a search on "i850" and someone
else had problems with this chipset about a year ago. In that thread
jmk said:
Oops, I just remembered the nvram locations are printed out in your
message by MEMDEBUG, it's 'maxpa' below.
maxpa = F9DC -> 3F77000, maxpa1 = F9DC maxpa2 = 280
The convention is that this location is 0 if the physical memory size
is not known by the bios or is >64MB.
I guess we need to rethink how we do this, it's old code and hardware
moves on.

Did anyone do any work in order to get this chipset to work?

2. If it doesn't work am I likely to be able to hack the boot code to
get it to work? One of the posts mentioned something about being able
to get to the config data only from real mode, which made it sound
like it might be difficult because maybe the plan9 booter isn't
running in real mode yet. I'm an old retired unix kernel hacker but
this sounds like it might be kind of a hard first plan9 project.

3. Is assume the plan9 kernel will not recognize the HyperThreading
and "see" the CPU as 2 processors?

4. Assuming the i850e memory issue issolved, am I likely to run into
other problems with peripheral support? Of course, I can find a
graphics cards that will work.

Thanks in advance,

leb

Re: [9fans] plan9 support for Intel i850e chip set

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002 jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:

> there's no problem with plan 9 and hyperthreading, it just works.
> however, it doesn't buy you much as far as i can tell.

seems like you need the Intel compiler to make it work if it is going to
work, and even then, it doesn't work in many cases.

All that work Intel did on hyperthreading, and it is hard to see what it
bought us. It did buy hype, though, so maybe what is really is is:
hype-r-threading.

ron

Re: [9fans] plan9 support for Intel i850e chip set

[jmk]

the memory problem is really a bios issue, some will do it right, some won't.
try it and see, it's easy to hack around it if it doesn't work.

there's no problem with plan 9 and hyperthreading, it just works.
however, it doesn't buy you much as far as i can tell.

Re: [9fans] plan9 support for Intel i850e chip set

[Russ Cox]

There's some LCD-only support for the i810 chip set,
but I don't think there's any support at all for the i850.
The memory complication that jmk pointed out is
just one more complication, though your bios might
behave differently.  Buying a supported graphics card
might be a better bet than trying to hack on vga.

Jmk had an smt processor running Plan 9 a few months ago.
I don't remember much else.

Russ