[9fans] 9pi

[9fans] 9pi

[Richard Miller]

Progress report on Plan 9 for raspberry pi:

Driver for sd/mmc card is now up and running, just in time for
Bakul Shah to demonstrate 9pi at the Raspberry Jam today at the
Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  I hope he'll post a
report.

With local fossil on SD card, 9pi can now build its own kernel:

>     9pi% time mk 'CONF=pif'
>     ...
>     24.26u 16.68s 67.86r     mk CONF=pif

This is on Bakul's fast SDHC card.  On my crufty old 2GB SD card
it takes 484 seconds.  There's scope for more tuning of the driver,
but getting USB working is probably the next priority.

Re: [9fans] 9pi

[cinap_lenrek]

pif = ported it fast :)

--
cinap

Re: [9fans] 9pi

[Bakul Shah]

On Sat, 18 Aug 2012 19:31:27 BST Richard Miller <9fans@hamnavoe.com>  wrote:
> Progress report on Plan 9 for raspberry pi:
>
> Driver for sd/mmc card is now up and running, just in time for
> Bakul Shah to demonstrate 9pi at the Raspberry Jam today at the
> Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  I hope he'll post a
> report.
>
> With local fossil on SD card, 9pi can now build its own kernel:
>
> >     9pi% time mk 'CONF=pif'
> >     ...
> >     24.26u 16.68s 67.86r     mk CONF=pif
>
> This is on Bakul's fast SDHC card.  On my crufty old 2GB SD card
> it takes 484 seconds.  There's scope for more tuning of the driver,
> but getting USB working is probably the next priority.

Meant to get this out last night but ran out of idle time.

Plan9 on RaspberryPi:
+ Kernel compiles in a minute (class 4 card, 800Mz cpu).
+ cd /sys/src && mk all in about 36 minutes.
+ Serial console
+ /dev/draw to framebuffer (display on HDMI/TV)
**good enough** for native development environment!

Much work remains:
- USB driver (need that for keyboard, mouse, ethernet).
- SHDC performance improvements
- Raspi specific drivers (GPIO, SPI etc)
- bug fixes
- some performance tuning

Hopefully there will be more to see at the next meet in a
month or so.

Re: [9fans] 9pi

[erik quanstrom]

really excellent stuff!

what's the easiest way to transfer files on and off the machine?

- erik

Re: [9fans] 9pi

[Richard Miller]

> what's the easiest way to transfer files on and off the machine?

Just stick the SD card in another machine.  There has to be
a FAT partition for booting; or you can access the fossil
partition if you have an sd card reader on a plan 9 machine.

You can boot the rpi as a cpu server networked via ppp, but
it's painfully slow.  In theory the uart will go up to
3Mb/s, but you need something on the other end that can
keep up.