Re: difference cdrom boot and 9fat boot?

[Jens Staal <staal1978@gmail.com>]

I had exactly the same issue with 9atom (only 8M of memory, then boot
crash while initializing filesystem kfs on 9atom and some zipped fs on
9front when booting from 9fat, but both the live CDs work great). The
difference is that I could rescue the 9atom install by copying the
official plan9 pcf to 9fat. I really have no idea what the difference
really is, but since I had the same issue with both 9atom and 9front,
it should not be 9load vs 9bootfat. The difference between the
official Plan9 pcf (that boots from 9fat) and the 9atom/9front kernels
is that the official one is a bit bigger.

I have tried to set and unset a number of stuff in plan9.ini according
to what I have been able to read up on in
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/installation_troubleshooting/diff.html
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/8/plan9.ini

stuff I have tried to set and unset:
*nomp=1
*maxmem=0xF0000000
*nomce=1
*noe820scan=1
*nopcirouting=1
*nobios=1

My current plan9.ini is quite simple (and a similar one worked with
the Plan9 pcf on 9atom)

bootfile=sdE0!9fat!9pcf
bootargs=local!/dev/sdE0/fscache
sysname=cirno
mouseport=ps2
monitor=vesa
vgasize=1280x800x32

*ncpu=2


About the iso being bigger: The thing I was talking about before was
that the pcf from the official Plan9 iso
(http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/download.html) was bigger than from
9atom or (http://www.quanstro.net/plan9/9atom/) or 9front
(http://aiju.de/9front.iso).

sha1sum for my 9front iso: 26501eb0b21ed07bf2186ebb6b698cf641177223

I am just completely confused about why the cdrom boot would work for
both 9atom and 9front but not 9fat boot...
I am especially eager to get 9front working since that one has network
out-of-the box and I do like the idea of being able to update the
system via Hg :)

Is there documentation somewhere about what the point/reason/aims are
for 9front vs official Plan9 or 9atom? I just stumbled upon this in
search of the broadcom driver :) If I understand it correctly it tries
to modernize the distro and evolve it, which I think looks quite
interesting (especially since I am planning to use it as my hobbyist
OS while learning).

2011/5/31  <cinap_lenrek@gmx.de>:
> the iso is bigger because we include the full hg (mercurial
> distributed version control system) repository and because
> 9front includes python and its dependencies so you can use
> hg to update your system.
>
> --
> cinap
>