Re: [9fans] 9vx as a perfect proto environment

[Iruata Souza <iru.muzgo@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
>> It's fast. But the big beauty of it for me is that in vx32/src/9vx/a
>> is pretty much a plan 9 kernel in plan 9 C vernacular. I just spent an
>> easy short time prototyping some new stuff that I can now drop into a
>> real plan 9 kernel for Blue Gene, no changes needed. The
>> edit/build/test boot cycle is measured in seconds. The fact that we
>> have a friendly path via codereview(1) and bitbucket is the icing on
>> the cake.
>
> This is definitely one of my favorite things about 9vx.
> It's a great environment for doing kernel hacking.
>
>> [comments about instability]
>
> I don't think there's any inherent reason why 9vx must be unstable,
> but it certainly has a couple bugs.  I haven't had the time to track
> them down and fix them, but I'm always happy to point in the
> right direction if you can reproduce one.  There have been a
> few reports about it dying with cryptic errors from vx32.  I'd like
> to track those down but a reproducible test case is an absolute
> requirement for the gritty low-level code at the bottom.
>
> The fact that 9vx works as well as it does has always made me
> feel like I was cheating.  It feels like it should be impossible
> or at least much harder, and yet there it is, and most things run.
>

the new boot code i am working on was written in 9vx.

i found it - and other programs as well - to hang on one of my
machines, but i still think it occurs because of ubuntu + what appears
to be a bad video driver + pulseaudio + X + ...

if that seems familiar to anyone, let me know that i'm not alone.

iru