[9fans] Plan 9 on a SunPCI card.

[Jerome Ibanes <jibanes@eskimo.com>]

I would like to install Plan 9 on a SunPCI IIIpro card (1), currently
located in a "old" Sun Blade 150 (2). This card has an Athlon XP 2200
(1600Mhz) and currently has 768MB of memory; it works in (almost) any pci
sparc v9 system running Solaris/OpenSolaris.

Interestingly enough, this card can either use a harddrive image to boot
(which is more or less a raw drive image located on the Solaris partition
with a somewhat specific 1024 bytes header, which happens to be rather
easy to forge) or a physical harddrive attached to its internal IDE
connector (which is 44 pins, laptop sized).

I haven't found a way to "boot" this card from a cdrom using the plan9
cdrom (3), even when such cdrom is directly attached to this card (please
note that Debian boots fine from there, when a plan9 cdrom is inserted I
get the famous "Operating System not found", although I haven't spent a
lot of time investigating this issue the fact that Debian boots seems not
to indicate a hardware issue). It seems that the internal floppy slot is
not working (by design) and this card can not network (pxe) boot (although
it has a network port) directly (it can network boot thru grub when grub
is compiled with --enable-diskless and support for the right network
chipset, and finally placed on a diskimage, more on this later).

I was able, however to generate a diskimage from a plan 9 raw disk
image (4), 9load starts "normally", but can not find an attached
harddrive (it however displays booting options to be fd0 and ether0):

  pcirouting: South bridge 1106, 3177 not found

might be the issue. By looking at /sys/src/9/pc/pci.c it *seems* that
making a disk image with:

  { 0x1106, 0x3177, viaget, viaset },   /* Viatech VT8235 */

would tremendously help. Do you think the lack of a recognized South
bridge would prevent 9load to find an attached harddrive, or would 9load
use INT13 to do so?

I have also tried to boot this card from network by using grub to do so,
therefore I have generated a disk image with support for the Via Rhine II
chipset (as present on the SunPCI IIIpro) built in into grub but
unfortunately, after fetching 9load via tftp the card cycles almost
immediately. Has anyone been able, or is currently using grub to boot
9load, if so, would any extra parameters be required?

Finally, assuming building 9load with support for the South bridge doesn't
help, could anyone think about any other way to run plan 9 on the SunPCI?


Sincerely,
Jerome Ibanes

References:
(1) SunPCI card: http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpcipro/
(2) Sun Blade: http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/sunblade150/
(3) http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/download/plan9.iso.bz2
(4) using this: http://www.oszoo.org/wiki/index.php/Plan9_070107.zip