Re: [9fans] Someone made a Wayland compositor based on Rio, Wio

[Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com>]

On 5/5/19, cinap_lenrek@felloff.net <cinap_lenrek@felloff.net> wrote:
>
> [ ... ]
>
> you can try to add the etherelnk3 line to the pc64 config and
> rebuild.
>
Done that, partially, jury is still out. But now I have a test bench
to try things out a little more reliably. Watch this space, I need a
bit of time...

> if you have this issue with the 386 kernel, then knowing the pci
> device id would be a start.
>
We're OK with 386, I downgraded 9ants to 32 bits and it seems to work
pretty well. A good opportunity to benchmark 64-bit versus 32-bit on
the same hardware, something that has got me curious.

(Incidentally, does 9ants support Go as robustly as 9legacy does? Go
is critical to my work and so is SSH - sshnet, was it, that provided
port forwarding? That's another critical feature, so may be OpenVPN,
but so far that has been too slow on Linux, so it's not a priority.)

> the boot process is nothing special. we have a bootloader that loads
> the kernel. the loader uses BIOS/EFI calls to get the kernel from the
> boot media so that it does not need drivers. once the kernel
> is taking over, it needs a driver.
>
Got that sorted, I need to get more familiar with the EFI and GUID
stuff, I know EFI is a trap, but GUID seems an innocent bit of
collateral benefit.

So now I have a somewhat dated instance of 9front on my desktop
courtesy of the VXL Percio diskless workstation, about as limited a
piece of hardware as you can find. That will provide an honest
workbenchin itself. It multiboots various Plan 9 combinations off
compact flash.

That's in addition to a working version of 9ants which will be
promoted to 64-bit once I have a network adapter in it that is
supported by all OSes: Linux Mint, NetBSD and 9ants.

What I need next is definitely Atheros network support, I'm not a
great Wi-Fi fan, but that can't be discounted. I'll start by finding
out what seems to ail the elnk3 driver on amd64. I have half a dozen
3c905[bc] adapters I'd rather not just discard.

Next, a long way off, is bringing 9front, 9ant and 9legacy closer
together, with Minix-3 and NetBSD as even more distant convergences.
Small steps, that is all I can promise. Keep in mind where Minix-3
lurks, before you discount it...

Lucio.

PS: Thanks everyone for your support, I'd like to list you all by
name, but I'm sure to leave someone out. Still, we're a community and
everyone contributes, so my thanks go to all, really, trolls included.