Several 9front Bug Reports (fwd)

[Julius Schmidt <aiju@phicode.de>]

sl still hasn't fixed the spf blacklist issue so tony kaku had me forward 
this.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2017 22:04:30 +0100
From: Tony Kaku <tonykaku@openmailbox.org>
To: aiju@phicode.de
Subject: Several 9front Bug Reports

Hi,

I've recently installed 9front, and I ran into several seemingly
unrelated bugs. I'd be grateful if you guys could look into them.

tl;dr:
     * /net/ether0 missing on two separate machines
     * MBR hangs on a certain boot configuration
     * laptop fan spins violently and unnecessarily

Long story:

I've been using 9front from qemu for a while now, and I've gotten
familiar enough with it that I decided to install it on real hardware,
with multiple machines comprising a single system.

I own a desktop computer[0], a laptop[1], and a Raspberry Pi. I wanted
to try arranging these machines in different term/disk/auth/cpu
combinations, so I decided to install to a external hard drive. This
way I could easily move the disk across devices to try various
configurations, and also test the system on all my machines before I
networked them together.

I configured the Pi to boot 9pif, and decided to wait until I've set
up the x86 machines and come back to it.

I performed the installation on the laptop, and everything was working
fine except for the lack of ethernet. The installer failed to detect
ethernet and switched to PPP configuration, which I backed out of. I
thought this was only a problem on the live USB, but it persisted on
the installed OS as well. I deduced that /net/ether0 was missing.

I then moved the external hard drive to the desktop. It's old and
doesn't support booting directly from USB devices. My workaround is to
set the BIOS to boot from HDD, and configure the desired USB device as
the first hard disk. This has worked for many Linux distros in the
past, as well as OpenBSD and the 9front installer itself (I played
around with the live environment in the past). But when I tried to
boot from the external hard disk, the MBR fell into an infinite loop
of printing "MBR...MBR...MBR...". I've narrowed down that this means
its infinitely looping over /sys/src/boot/pc/mbr.s:58. I'm not sure
why exactly this happens in this particular boot configuration.

I worked around this problem by pluging in both the installation USB
and the external hard drive, booting from the USB, and setting
bootargs to the file system on the hard drive.

I then found that the desktop is also missing /net/ether0. In
retrospect, ethernet never worked when I was trying 9front out live on
either of my machines, but I didn't think the problem would persist on
a real installation.

Booting 9front on the laptop again later and using it for a while, the
laptop fan started to spin about three times as loudly then ever
before. I was doing no computationally expensive tasks, and stats(1)
was showing negligible load. As the fan slowly got louder, I decided
to quickly reboot so as not to damage my laptop. The problem persisted
as the fan would keep spinning up after a certain amount of time after
boot. Same thing next day. It might be relevant that I've had problems
in the past with this laptop where certain versions of Linux
distributions would kernel panic at boot, whether it was off USB or
elsewhere.

Thanks,
tonykaku

--

[0] http://sysinfo.9front.org/src/138/body
[1] http://sysinfo.9front.org/src/139/body