Re: [9fans] P9P on Lemote Yeeloong

[Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 1:29 PM,  <lucio@proxima.alt.za> wrote:
>> since the hard part is writing drivers, just do a normal port using v[acl].
>> not fussing about with all the other things that will otherwise go wrong
>> will allow you more time to write those drivers.
>
> My take is perhaps flawed, but the way I see it, the BIOS, bootstrap
> loader and debugger (all rolled into PMON, supplied with source and
> ready for cross compilation on a Linux/386 platform) insists on ELF,
> optionally S-record format executables.
>

There are versions of Plan 9 compilers that support both those formats
-- perhaps it won't be as hard as you expect.
BlueGene boots Plan 9 from ELF binaries for instance.

>
> Now, I really don't mind hearing of different approaches, often these
> have turned out to be better than the dead end I had picked, so I'll
> keep that firmly in mind.  In this case there is a small additional
> advantage to go the ELF/GCC route, namely that I will be using a
> 64-bit compiler for the kernel itself.
>

There are 64-bit compilers available for Plan 9 as well (for specific
architectures, namely x86_64 and ppc64).  So you are a bit out of
luck here on MIPS (unless Brzr has a MIPS64 compiler I've forgotten
about).

     -eric