Re: [9fans] IRQs again...

[Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Mon, 27 May 2002 jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> We've been there and done that, both running the Plan 9 code base
> on hot-plug systems and using a Plan 9 kernel as the boot ROM (is it
> really almost 10 years ago?).

Everybody has. I did it 25 years ago on all kinds of stuff, with all kinds
of OSes, some Unix, some not. I don't think our past successes, however
impressive, are the issue here. Having the OS config interrupts is old
news. So we don't need (I think) to discuss how we all did it, unless the
result is a chunk of code in the same email. It's just not productive.

The issue is, that we need to do it now on stupid PC hardware, with stupid
M$-designed "$PIR" tables and stupid broken PC chipsets. My first pass
through 4e source shows there are lots of problems with how plan9 is doing
it and that's what we're trying to figure out. We've fixed one or two
things but we're still chasing all the problems. Linux gets it right, and
plan9 doesn't, and that bothers me quite a bit. I want Plan 9 to be as
good as Linux in this area. I hope that is a shared goal.

> Before you flashed LinuxBIOS on the motherboard, is it likely Plan 9
> would have booted?

Sure, on the one board it does, but that fact has not been terribly
helpful, esp. as it seems plan9 did not always configure things right even
under the BIOS -- these BIOSes do amazingly confusing things for good
OSes to get mixed up by.

ron