From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Lawrence E. Bakst" Message-ID: <801f0ad7.0212141838.3c5319fb@posting.google.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: [9fans] plan9 support for Intel i850e chip set Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 09:49:48 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 33ba463e-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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