Hello!
after a long term my interest in Plan9 received new input by Tim
Newsham's ninefs. My current employee forces me to use computing
infrastructure based on Microsoft Operating systems. With ninefs i hope
to be able to use a fossil+venti fileserver instead of our ubiquitous
project "SHARE".
To start playing around, i got myself an obsoleted Dell Latitude, Model
CPt, about eight years old by now, and downloaded the current Plan9
installation CD.
First problem: the bootloader starts, scans the IDE-Controller but does
not find the CD-ROM neither the harddisk.
So i take the Plan9 CD home, and start over with my old Compaq Armada
1700, probably two years older then the Dell, it has even a floppy
drive!
Hooray - the Armada boots the installation system and i can proceed with
a default fossil+venti installation. After reboot:
Second problem: "out of physical memory; no swap configured"
After confirming the "root is from" prompt and specifying user "glenda"
Plan9 tries to start venti, where it runs out of memory.
There is a line before the "root is from" line upon boot, it says:
160M memory: 66M kernel data, 93M user, 368M swap
Three days later (well, i don't have much time for playing around each
day) i finally found out about venti.conf's mem, bcmem and icmem and
set ridiculously small values for them, which makes my future file
server finally start up.
I did not experience this behaviour two years ago. Why does current
venti use memory settings which are incompatible with available physical
memory? Why does Plan9 say that there is "no swap configured"?
Ok, so the disk with the readily installed Plan9 OS was returned to the
Dell Latitude. By the way, venti's default memory settings don't work
here either with:
256M memory: 105M kernel data, 151M user, 576M swap
Third problem: no ethernet
I guess this is because the TI PCI1220/1225 is not supported.
Find below the pci devices as given from Linux' lspci output
Regards,
Jorge-León
Dell Latitude CPt:
Host/PCI bridge: Intel 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX
IDE: Intel 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1225 (rev 01)
Ethernet (PCMCIA Card): Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
Compaq Armada 1700:
Host/PCI bridge: Intel 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX
IDE: Intel 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1220 (rev 02)
Ethernet (PCMCIA Card): Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
