Title: Plan 9 on Previous
Post by: cuby on January 21, 2023, 04:34:58 AM
Post by: cuby on January 21, 2023, 04:34:58 AM
Plan 9 (second edition) runs netbooted in Previous including the GUI using the u9fs 9p server. There are a number of minor glitches (e.g. the utf8 mapping of filenames), I'll try to fix these and write a HOWTO in the next couple of days... now let's see if Plan 9 likes the SCSI emulation in Previous. [update: no, the 9nextstationdisk kernel hangs at startup...]
Title: Re: Plan 9 on Previous
Post by: bkmoore on March 11, 2023, 11:06:52 AM
Post by: bkmoore on March 11, 2023, 11:06:52 AM
This is very interesting. Lately, I have been playing with 9Front on modern hardware.
I looked into Plan 9 on Next, and it seems only the 2nd edition officially supported it. Fortunately historical versions of Plan 9 can be downloaded from the Plan 9 foundation - link below. Reading the documentation, it looks like Plan 9 was meant to be installed in the /usr/local directory on a running next system. Then you added some configuration files to enable net booting as a terminal, basically a dual boot configuration. Is this how you got Previous to boot Plan 9? Or did you configure Previous as a PXE terminal? It would be interesting to see Plan 9 running bare metal on a Next Computer. If I hadn't sold my Next, I'd probably give it a try.
https://9p.io/plan9/history.html (https://9p.io/plan9/history.html)
I looked into Plan 9 on Next, and it seems only the 2nd edition officially supported it. Fortunately historical versions of Plan 9 can be downloaded from the Plan 9 foundation - link below. Reading the documentation, it looks like Plan 9 was meant to be installed in the /usr/local directory on a running next system. Then you added some configuration files to enable net booting as a terminal, basically a dual boot configuration. Is this how you got Previous to boot Plan 9? Or did you configure Previous as a PXE terminal? It would be interesting to see Plan 9 running bare metal on a Next Computer. If I hadn't sold my Next, I'd probably give it a try.
https://9p.io/plan9/history.html (https://9p.io/plan9/history.html)
Title: Re: Plan 9 on Previous
Post by: cuby on March 11, 2023, 05:34:44 PM
Post by: cuby on March 11, 2023, 05:34:44 PM
Quote from: bkmoore on March 11, 2023, 11:06:52 AMI looked into Plan 9 on Next, and it seems only the 2nd edition officially supported it. Fortunately historical versions of Plan 9 can be downloaded from the Plan 9 foundation - link below.Exactly, the NeXT code was never ported to the more recent graphics system in Plan 9 3rd edition. This is on my (long) to-do list, but I haven't found any documentation about the differences so far.
I'm using the binary kernel as well as a self-compiled one from 2nd edition.
QuoteReading the documentation, it looks like Plan 9 was meant to be installed in the /usr/local directory on a running next system. Then you added some configuration files to enable net booting as a terminal, basically a dual boot configuration. Is this how you got Previous to boot Plan 9? Or did you configure Previous as a PXE terminal? It would be interesting to see Plan 9 running bare metal on a Next Computer. If I hadn't sold my Next, I'd probably give it a try.The Plan 9 kernel for NeXT can be built as a Mach-O binary which allows it to be directly booted via bootp/tftp from the NeXT ROM monitor.
I then ran u9fs (https://github.com/unofficial-mirror/u9fs (https://github.com/unofficial-mirror/u9fs)) on the MacOS host running Previous, netbooted Plan 9 and entered the file/auth server IPs of the host running Previous (the host running Previous is reachable at IP address 10.0.2.2, the emulated machine is 10.0.2.15), so the Plan 9 kernel could mount its root fs using 9p.