From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: "Russ Cox" Date: Sun, 6 Nov 2005 17:50:01 -0500 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [9fans] changes on sources Topicbox-Message-UUID: a72fccc4-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 [The short version: lots of new binaries and features; you need a new 9load to run the new kernels.] A few files changed on sources today. The major change was pushing out the new pc mmu code, which runs with the kernel at 0xF0000000 instead of 0x80000000. There are some other kernel-maintained data structures at 0xE0000000. User processes can have everything underneath, so 3.5GB. The new code has a cleaner separation of virtual and physical addresses, which should address the various mmukmap2 panics that people have reported over the years. It also lets the PC kernel use up to 4GB of memory, minus whatever is used by device memory mappings. To boot one of these new kernels you will need to copy the new /386/9load to your 9fat or floppy disk so that it can cope with the new kernel load address. (It will still handle the old ones too.) Various other changes got pushed out with the new mmu code. The kernel no longer assumes that there are two memory banks. Instead there is an array Conf.mem which can be made larger as needed. This should help with the sparc revival. The pc kernels have the changes from the VESA kernels from April. This means that resizing the screen once rio is running should be possible, and running with monitor=vesa should use the VESA extensions to set up the screen. The pc kernels use the BIOS E820 memory map when available rather than poking at each megabyte until they decide there's no more. If you have a system where this causes problems, you can put *noe820scan= in plan9.ini, and then please let us know so we can try to fix them. The devsd internals are shuffled around a bit to make hot-swap disks and the like a bit easier to support. There is also a new driver sdmv50xx for the Marvell 88SX5040 family of SATA cards. Thank you to Coraid. Libmach and all the programs that depend on it now use what should be a 64-bit safe interface, in preparation for the AMD64. Much of it is only lightly tested, so if you see strange behavior, let us know. A few programs have been updated to be 64-bit safe. Others have not. The distribution floppy and CD should be updated tomorrow morning by the nightly rebuild. As always, if you see problems mail 9fans or 9trouble or submit patches. Enjoy. - rsc, jmk