Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[boyd, rounin]

i have a 256MB USB flash disk.  you can fit the whole dist + some on that.

resistant to x-rays and long haul flights ;)

[9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Geoff Collyer]

I've just booted my (Pentium Pro) terminal without using any rotating
disk.

I bought a compact-flash-to-IDE converter from PC Engine.  It's called
the CFDISK.5D and I got mine from http://store.ituner.com/ituner (in
Fremont, CA) for US$20.  Look under `CF IDE Adapters'.  There are
other variations and you might want to buy one of them instead if
there isn't room to insert the CFDISK.5D directly into an IDE
controller slot on your motherboard.

For booting Plan 9, you can use the smallest compact flash card you
can find (I had a 4MB and a 10MB lying around, but the smallest you
can buy new seems to be 32MB).  Currently you can buy 16MB Sandisk
cards for US$10.50 at http://www.stores.ebay.com/fcoelectronics.

The example of setting up a disk in prep(8) almost works but you only
want the 9fat, and prep expects 9fat to be exactly 10MB (leaving no
room on a 10MB card for boot blocks, etc.).  I ran prep by hand to set
up a slightly smaller 9fat on my 10MB card.

The CFDISK.5D (but perhaps not some of the variants) requires a 4-pin
floppy power cable and many machines provide only one (and you'll need
that to boot until you populate your compact flash card).  I got those
at CompUSA for US$13.

Make a plan9 boot floppy per the example in prep(8).  Copy your
machine's plan9.ini (and nvram in plan9.nvr if it has one) somewhere
handy, like /tmp.

Once you've gathered all those parts, turn off your machine (at the
power supply if possible), insert the compact flash card into the
CFDISK.5D or relative (it slides in easily), connect the floppy power
cable to a free power connector inside the PC and the other end to the
CFDISK.5D at the floppy-style power connector.  Insert the CFDISK.5D
into the first free IDE connector on your motherboard (I had to use
the second one due to short-sighted physical design of my machine).
It's keyed so you can't insert it wrong-way-round.  At this point your
machine probably won't boot off your existing disks nor your
(uninitialised) compact flash, so insert the boot floppy and turn the
machine on.  When it comes up, format the compact flash per the
example in prep(8), modulo the possible need to partition it by hand.
You should now be able to remove the boot floppy (and any other disks
you no longer need) and reboot.  The machine should come up by booting
from the compact flash (mine did, first time).

So that's US$43.50 per machine, plus shipping, but it won't wear out
from being read (like a floppy) and is utterly quiet (unlike a regular
disk).  It seems like just the thing to make sure that your main file
server and CPU server boot unattended.

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Charles Forsyth]

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does a BIOS know how to boot from mass storage on USB?

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From: "boyd, rounin" <boyd@insultant.net>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 08:00:57 +0100
Message-ID: <006501c3f9da$cad158d0$0a00a8c0@SOMA>

i have a 256MB USB flash disk.  you can fit the whole dist + some on that.

resistant to x-rays and long haul flights ;)

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Richard Miller]

> does a BIOS know how to boot from mass storage on USB?

Some do, if you tell them it's a zip drive.

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Charles Forsyth]

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of course.  why didn't i think of that?

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From: Richard Miller <rm@hamnavoe.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 09:23:33 0000
Message-ID: <a56ee428104a3949f840c4156e8b6af7@hamnavoe.com>

> does a BIOS know how to boot from mass storage on USB?

Some do, if you tell them it's a zip drive.

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[matt]

by coincedence booting from CF is my current mini-project (though I'm working on getting freebsd to boot so I can use it in my car as mp3 player)

I know the series has been mentioned before but the new EPIA boards have CF slots built in (and a PC CARD slot)

They come in 600Mhz and 1000Mhz and are fanless.
I don't have one personally so I cant say of the built in VGA & LAN have plan9 drivers.
(though I doubt it)

LAN : VIA Networking Tahoe VT6103 Fast Ethernet 10/100 PHY-ceiver
VGA : Integrated VIA Unichrome  2D/3D graphics with MPEG-2 Accelerator, motion compensation and duo-view support

But if the PCMCIA works one could stick in a Wavelan.

Here's a place with worldwide shipping

600Mhz
http://linitx.com/product_info.php?cPath=12_41&products_id=333

1000Mhz
http://linitx.com/product_info.php?cPath=12_41&products_id=332


m

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Matthias Teege]

On Mon Feb 23 10:09:31 GMT 2004, matt@proweb.co.uk wrote:
> by coincedence booting from CF is my current mini-project (though I'm working on getting freebsd to boot so I can use it in my car as mp3 player)

FreeBSD work great from CF. I use it for access points and routers.
Take a look at http://tinyurl.com/2wcxe

Matthias

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Jim Choate]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Charles Forsyth wrote:

> does a BIOS know how to boot from mass storage on USB?

Try the new class of motherboards from Intel that don't know about serial
or floppies. Those babies are dinosaurs, and they won't be as entertaining
as Gwanji.

 -- --

  Open Forge, LLC  24/365 Onsite Support for PCs, Networks, & Game Consoles
  512-695-4126 (Austin, Tx.)                            help@open-forge.com

  Hangar 18          Open Source Distributed Computing Using Plan 9 & Linux
  512-451-7087                               http://open-forge.org/hangar18

  James Choate    512-451-7087     ravage@ssz.com    jchoate@open-forge.com

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[andrey mirtchovski]

I was able to boot my first completely spin-less ituner just now using
LinuxBIOS, CF and a lot of help from Ron. :)

It takes 14 seconds to go from power on to "init: starting /bin/rc"!

andrey

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[ron minnich]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, andrey mirtchovski wrote:

> It takes 14 seconds to go from power on to "init: starting /bin/rc"!

we gotta speed that up.

ron

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[andrey mirtchovski]

> On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, andrey mirtchovski wrote:
>
>> It takes 14 seconds to go from power on to "init: starting /bin/rc"!
>
> we gotta speed that up.

I think 14 is pretty good considering you get the _entire_ system up,
ready to accept logins.  How fast can you go from 'mounting root' to a
boot prompt on a standard Linux distribution (i.e.  one that's not
modified especially for speed)?

Plan 9 on the ituner takes 10 seconds to come up ready to serve from
the time it finds the ethernet card (that means DHCP, connection,
authentication, namespace setup, cpurc)...

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[ron minnich]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, andrey mirtchovski wrote:

> I think 14 is pretty good considering you get the _entire_ system up,
> ready to accept logins.  How fast can you go from 'mounting root' to a
> boot prompt on a standard Linux distribution (i.e.  one that's not
> modified especially for speed)?

it's fine but I want 5 seconds.

ron

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[matt]

yeah, 14 seconds sounds like an age

my bsd from CF isn't much more than that before it's playing mp3s from the cdrom

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[ron minnich]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 matt@proweb.co.uk wrote:

> yeah, 14 seconds sounds like an age
>
> my bsd from CF isn't much more than that before it's playing mp3s from
> the cdrom

Is that bsd from CF doing a full general-purpose boot, or is it
specialized to being an mp3 player?

I'm still trying to work out the timing. This may in part be slowness of
the front end. But these ituners are only 533 mhz C3 so that could be part
of it too.

Plan 9 is up and running in 5 seconds. Then there's 5 seconds of "stuff"
until the time... message is printed, then four more seconds of "stuff".

Although I just did another boot and it took 10 seconds. Hmm. try again.
Yeah. 10 seconds again. and 10 seconds again. And again. Hmm.

OK, one factor is that the console is at 19.2KB, and etherboot prints a
'.' every block of loading from flash. This can add to time. Etherboot has
a timeout for a prompt, more time lost. So the first 5 seconds is clearly
interactive overhead in etherboot losing time. But Plan 9 is definitely up
and running at the 5 second mark.

The time from 'Plan 9 start' to 'Plan 9 cpu prompt' varies a lot. If it is
done a lot, then it goes to about 5 seconds. If you have not done it for a
while, it takes more like 9 seconds. I blame the laptop I'm using as the
auth/fs/whatever server.

ron

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[matt]

> Is that bsd from CF doing a full general-purpose boot, or is it
specialized to being an mp3 player?

It's a stock FreeBSD 4.8 crammed into 22Mb using Matthias' very helpful page he posted earlier

The kernel is GENERIC with the SCSI stuff and unused network cards removed

it runs sshd and usbd and portmap (I was playing with using amd)

time from hitting power to hearing "music" is 35 seconds

time from hitting power to getting to the FreeBSD boot manager 12 seconds

mpg123 alone has a 5 second startup

the playlist script isn't very tuned for speed:
 'find /mnt/cdrom* | grep mp3 | mpg123 -@ - -Z'

(it's cdrom* because by luck someone gave me an NEC 4 cd rom changer years ago)


m

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[ron minnich]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 matt@proweb.co.uk wrote:

> time from hitting power to getting to the FreeBSD boot manager 12 seconds

ah. boot manager. That's a slightly different thing than I'm saying.

When I say 10 seconds, that is the time to system up and running as a
multi-user cpu server. When I get that console prompt, system is ready to
go and support cpu commands from other hosts.

ron

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Kenji Okamoto]

Interesting, I'd like to use it for our new auth server machine.

> I bought a compact-flash-to-IDE converter from PC Engine.  It's called
> the CFDISK.5D and I got mine from http://store.ituner.com/ituner (in
> Fremont, CA) for US$20.  Look under `CF IDE Adapters'.

I don't know this type of card.   Is the card made to insert it into 40 pins
IDE interface slot?   Any type of this ind cand can be fine?   I'm afraid this
whether I can find the one you are using?

Kenji

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Geoff Collyer]

The card is actually made for PC Engines (note the final `s') of
Switzerland.  http://www.pcengines.ch/flash.htm lists the variations,
has pictures and lists distributors.  The bottom-most picture is the
CFDISK.5D, which is what I used.  It does indeed plug directly into a
motherboard IDE connector, but there are others variants that
incorporate an IDE disk connector, such as the CFDISK.1D.

> Any type of this ind cand can be fine?

I'm not sure what you're asking.

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[Kenji Okamoto]

> http://www.pcengines.ch/flash.htm lists the variations,

http://www.pcengines.ch/cflash.htm ☺

Anyway, this page solved my previous question.
Thank you very much, Geoff.
Now, I have to search which store is selling this device
around Osaka.

Kenji

Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[matt]

> ah. boot manager. That's a slightly different thing than I'm saying.
> When I say 10 seconds, that is the time to system up and running as a ...

when I said "14 seconds isn't much less than my box" I hadn't actually timed it. It just didn't seem to be taking very long.

I'm fairly happy with 35s, I didn't try to optimize for speed really. The kernel is gzipped up, for instance, as is the /dev summary file.

 I see that "via/epia stable" is on the linux bios status page

Can one readily boot FreeBSd with linux bios ?

m