[9fans] Plan 9 via QEMU

[Akshat Kumar <akumar@mail.nanosouffle.net>]

... on Acer Aspire One to add more fun.

Yes, on the Acer Aspire One, I have
no means to compile, with all hopes of
GCC thwarted by the draconian schemes
of archaic Linux package managers,
all slowly drowning in dependency hell.
But enough fantasising --

No GCC, no kernel sources (which are
presumably highly customised for the
hardware), so no extra kernel modules.
This means bridging as well as filtering
are out the window, since I lack
bridge.ko, tun.ko, and ipt_wtf.ko (though
interestingly enough I found tun.ko that
someone had precompiled for the AAO).

And yet, I need to get QEMU to PXE
boot Plan 9 and then use the local Ken
FS server for root filesystem. The key
was a different style of networking here -
the pcap[1] device. It uses the host
system's device directly, so if I want to
PXE boot Plan 9 inside QEMU, I have
to 'ifconfig ath0 0.0.0.0' first, but it works.
The way around that would be to use a
different MAC address for the emulated
device, which is possible with plain ether-
net NIC, and with certain wireless config-
urations too, but ath0 won't allow it for
some reason.

So, QEMU starts up[2], PXE boots Plan 9,
which gets to the "root is from (tcp, il) [il]:"
prompt just fine, and subsequently the user
and password queries - all of this goes by
fine, and indicates network connectivity with
the CPU/auth server, but suddenly everything
kernel panics, I presume at the time of making
the connection with the Ken FS server (scrolls
by too fast for me to see the initial error
message).

If anyone has any experience or ideas regarding
that, I'd love to hear it.

Best,
ak

P.S.: I had to statically compile QEMU with the
pcap patch[1] on a mate's machine, long distance,
and copy the binary back. Version 0.9.1. No SDL,
for it's a bitch to statically compile, thus have to
use VNC to see output.

[1] http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1568
pcap patch for those curious or interested

[2] QEMU startup command:
sudo ./qemu -L bios -option-rom bios/pxe-rtl8139.bin \
-boot n -net nic,model=rtl8139,macaddr=00:22:68:C3:4C:08 \
-net pcap,devicename=ath0 -no-kqemu -soundhw sb16 \
-localtime -no-acpi -vnc :1
(yes, sudo: this is Linux, we have rules... and a
dictatorship to defeat their purpose)