Re: [9fans] Any significant gotchas?

["John S. Dyson" <toor@y1.jdyson.net>]

In article <396B1F62.24083.11FD481@localhost>,
	ngr@9fs.org (Nigel Roles) writes:
> 
> 
>> As some of you'all *might* know, I like playing with
>> OSes...  Any major gotchas in a planned booting
>> of plan9 on my SMP box? :-).  (Dell Precision 620,
>> dual 866 Xeon, with 1GB.)
>> 
> 
> 
> THe usual gotchas are
> 
> 1) video card
> 2) SCSI card
> 
> read the hardware compatibility list.
> 
Of course...  How is stability?  Is there opportunity for
significant improvements in the kernel?  If I choose to run
1000 (or 10000 or 20000) processes on a single machine (not
uncommon on some machines nowadays), will the kernel work well,
degrading smoothly?  If I might want to spend alot of time
working on the code, I'd like to know where you think that
the improvement opportunities are.  When I initially looked
at the code a few years ago, I was impressed with both the
simplicity, but also saw some scalability problems.  It was
really great to see code that hasn't already been obscured
with complexity.  From an immediate gratification standpoint,
this might be alot of fun for me.

It is well understood that relatively less used OSes
will often need more driver support than they already have.
So, I kind-of already knew of that issue.  Note also, there
are often Network Card driver issues -- some manus don't
always fully document their cards, and change PCI ids, thereby
confounding probe code.  This problem is common, and thankfully,
there are alot of source-available OS codes available to work
from.

Also, one sometimes finds that X86 SMP implementations, with
differing APIC layouts, confound kernel startup.  I am not
initially depending upon running SMP, but it would be interesting
to hear anecdotal reports.  If the silly thing doesn't boot up, on
my day-to-day OS development machine, I'll buy another machine with
no hesitation.  It might be a good idea anyway to buy a Plan9-only
machine for any initial work.  (For example, FreeBSD required that
I recompile the kernel so as to support the large number of INTRs
available on the Dell 620.  Things dont always work out of the
box, even on slightly more common OSen.)

I have a copy of the entire comp.os.plan9 for the last few months,
and am encouraged with the traffic level.

John