[9front] 9front on Raspberry Pi 400

[Mack Wallace <mackbw@mapinternet.com>]

I have been trying to get 9 on my recently purchased Raspberry Pi 400, but have been running into some roadblocks. For better or worse, I started with the 9fans group and have managed to get labs 9 working. However, that lacks the 9front tools that I need to do things like rcpu, etc. 

So while I have had a bit of history trying to make this work, I’ll give you the most recent iteration. 

I used balenaEtcher to write the most recent pi3 image to a micro SD card. Upon booting that, I get the following;


127 holes free
0x004f0000 0x3e600000 1041301504
1041301504 bytes free

Plan 9
cpu0: 1500 MHz ARM Cortex-A72 r0p3
4006M Memory: 998M kernel data, 3008M user, 15011M swap
pcienable PCI.0.0.0: pcr 0->7
pcienable PCI.1.0.0: pcr 0->2
bus dev type     vid  did  intl memory
0   0/0 06 04 00 14e4 2711   0  ioa:00000000-00001000 4096 nema:600000000-600100000 1048576 ->1
1   0/0 0c 03 30 1106 3483   0  0:600000007 4096
#l0: genet: 1000Mbps port 0xFFFFFFFFBD580000 irq 189 ea dca632e63357
usbxhci: 0x1106 0x3483: port 600000000 size 4096 irq 0
cpu3: 1500MHz ARM Cortex-A72 r0p3
cpu2: 1500MHz ARM Cortex-A72 r0p3
cpu1: 1500MHz ARM Cortex-A72 r0p3
#l0: phy1 id 600d84a2 oui 80361
sdhc: readerror intr 2008002 stat 1fff0000
	{repeats 15 times}
/dev/sdM0: BCM SD Host Controller 02 Version 10
sdhc: readerror intr 2008002 stat 1fff0000
	{repeats 40 or so times}
/dev/sdM0/data
bootargs is (tcp, tls, il, local!device)[]


In my many times trying different things, I have had a few other errors. However, what I am showing is what I am getting now consistently having done the following.
I’ve replaced the Pi firmware files with the latest at of today. I then added ‘enable_gic=1’ to the config.txt file with no change.

Consistent amongst the previous attempts were the same one or two errors repeated many times, and not keyboard or mouse response (not surprising as the newer Pis need to have their usb firmware uploaded in the kernel). 

In case there were newer updates to the source, I did a sysupdate on a laptop I have with 9 and then tried to cross-compile a new kernel. However, I get a much smaller kernel (only 2.9MB rather than the 4.4MB in the 9front Pi image. I don’t know if this is unexpected. When I try to boot that kernel. The console screen comes up. But after CPU detection, the kernel panics and stops booting. I presume this is a problem with my compilation, (or myself) so I won’t clutter things up here with that kmesg unless asked for it. 

Hope someone has some guidance.


Thanks in advance!

Mack