Sunday, October 11, 2009

Fighting with PXE over. Fighting with Plan9 begins!

The original plan was to have the computer with the Radeon X1600 PXE-boot a kernel from a tftp server writable by the development host. The kernel would then connect to the auth and file servers, load a filesystem with the most recent version of aux/vga, and display a tty.

Unfortunately, after configuring the network and getting a kernel to boot, the plan collapsed: PXE appears to not properly reset the network card (a Realtek RTL8139 [0x10ec, 0x8139]), so the booted kernel could not connect to the auth server. So, at least for the time being, we're avoiding PXE and are instead booting from a local 9fat partition. This is more tedious, since each kernel revision must be explicitly written to the disk, and we need a working local kernel to do that. But it functions, and we have discovered yet another project for a rainy day.

I took a few minutes to modify 9/pc/kdb.c, changing the default hardcoded Qwerty layout to my preferred Dvorak. Feels like home.

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