Title: Compiling and running Plan 9
Post by: cuby on March 04, 2021, 11:35:32 AM
Post by: cuby on March 04, 2021, 11:35:32 AM
I picked up some work on Plan 9 again I started about a year ago and thought some of you might be interested...
The NeXT port of Plan 9 was a rather old version (second edition) and only ran on regular (non-Turbo) NeXTstations. The NeXT was probably only used as a netbooting terminal with fileservers etc. on the net in regular Plan 9 installations.
As a side result of our work on Plan 9 and Inferno ports for RISC-V, I got the 68020 cross-compiler toolchain for Plan 9 to work (though it's an ugly hack at the moment) and can now boot my self-compiled Plan 9 kernel via tftp in Previous.
There are a number of problems right now:
My long-term plan is to upgrade the code base to 4th Edition Plan 9, so the code can be freely redistributed (the 2nd Edition sources might have a problematic license) and to support other black hardware. Of course, I will also have to write some HOWTO to explain how to get this running.
My NeXTs are currently in storage in Germany, but I will try booting the NeXTstation in our museum here. This supposedly has a working Plan 9 installation, but hasn't been powered up for a decade or so, so this will probably take some time...
The NeXT port of Plan 9 was a rather old version (second edition) and only ran on regular (non-Turbo) NeXTstations. The NeXT was probably only used as a netbooting terminal with fileservers etc. on the net in regular Plan 9 installations.
As a side result of our work on Plan 9 and Inferno ports for RISC-V, I got the 68020 cross-compiler toolchain for Plan 9 to work (though it's an ugly hack at the moment) and can now boot my self-compiled Plan 9 kernel via tftp in Previous.
There are a number of problems right now:
- Trying to boot the 9nextstation kernel from disk reboots the machine
- Netbooting using another ugly hack (hardcoding the tftp boot file in src/slirp/tftp.c) works in an old version of Previous, needs testing on a recent version
- Network access is required to access the machine's root file system
My long-term plan is to upgrade the code base to 4th Edition Plan 9, so the code can be freely redistributed (the 2nd Edition sources might have a problematic license) and to support other black hardware. Of course, I will also have to write some HOWTO to explain how to get this running.
My NeXTs are currently in storage in Germany, but I will try booting the NeXTstation in our museum here. This supposedly has a working Plan 9 installation, but hasn't been powered up for a decade or so, so this will probably take some time...
Title: Re: Compiling and running Plan 9
Post by: BillAnderson on March 04, 2021, 05:07:05 PM
Post by: BillAnderson on March 04, 2021, 05:07:05 PM
Wow, I look forward to hearing more about this!
Title: Re: Compiling and running Plan 9
Post by: Scutboy on March 05, 2021, 10:35:25 AM
Post by: Scutboy on March 05, 2021, 10:35:25 AM
Cool!
Title: Re: Compiling and running Plan 9
Post by: K-Town Computeum on June 13, 2022, 04:34:32 AM
Post by: K-Town Computeum on June 13, 2022, 04:34:32 AM
@cuby Have you been able to make progress on this exciting project?
Title: Re: Compiling and running Plan 9
Post by: cuby on June 13, 2022, 05:03:07 AM
Post by: cuby on June 13, 2022, 05:03:07 AM
Quote@cuby Have you been able to make progress on this exciting project?
Yes, and I'm working on this right now. Netbooting the Plan 9 kernel works in Previous 2.5 now and I fixed the problem with the kernel crashing using more recent bootloaders mentioned in this article (http://9p.io/sources/contrib/steve/historic/2nd-edition/NeXT-cube) (so you don't need the workaround to set the PC to the correct initial value any longer).
I'm currently working on extending Previous to support the correct bootp replies to give the Plan 9 kernel information about its file and auth servers and to support 9p file system and auth access based on the SLIRP module of Previous (similar to the current NFS support).
A more sophisticated goal is to update the NeXT Plan 9 version to a current kernel and userland, but that might take a bit more time...
Grüße nach Kaiserslautern :)
Title: Re: Compiling and running Plan 9
Post by: K-Town Computeum on June 13, 2022, 05:51:45 AM
Post by: K-Town Computeum on June 13, 2022, 05:51:45 AM
That's awesome. Kudos for your great work 👍
Beste Grüße zurück zur schönsten Altstadt Deutschlands 🙂
Beste Grüße zurück zur schönsten Altstadt Deutschlands 🙂
Title: Re: Compiling and running Plan 9
Post by: Rob Blessin Black Hole on June 13, 2022, 03:37:46 PM
Post by: Rob Blessin Black Hole on June 13, 2022, 03:37:46 PM
Very cool stuff any screen shots ?