has anyone ported Plan 9 or Inferno to RasPi?

[arquebus]

Both Plan 9 and Inferno are old OS's that run on very small hardware, they should absolutely smoke on the RasPi. So has anyone ported either to the RasPi? Ive heard it is difficult to get them to run on x86 due to lack of drivers but that shouldnt be a problem for the RasPi.

[itimpi]

Both Plan 9 and Inferno are old OS's that run on very small hardware, they should absolutely smoke on the RasPi. So has anyone ported either to the RasPi? Ive heard it is difficult to get them to run on x86 due to lack of drivers but that shouldnt be a problem for the RasPi.

Why do you think drivers would not be a problem on the Pi?

Most older OS's pre-date USB, and SD cards so just getting those up and running would be a none-trivial issue. Upgrading drivers was one of the major tasks required for the RiscOS port to the Pi.

Having said that it would be great if someone COULD get such older OS running.

[Narishma]

I think what he meant is that since every Raspberry Pi has the same hardware, you'd only have one set of drivers to worry about.

[aaa801]

Mhm im looking into plan 9

[adrianmcmenamin]

Mhm im looking into plan 9

Let me know if you get anywhere - would be interested in whether we could get Plan 9 (fundamentally a distributed operating system( to run with multiple processors

[9pi]

Yes, I have Plan 9 running on raspberry pi, including drivers for the reasonably documented hardware devices - timers, uart, video framebuffer (unaccelerated). Currently struggling with SD card driver - it is able to initialise and select the card, but can't manage to read/write blocks yet. USB looks like the biggest challenge.

[Bakul Shah]

Tomorrow at the Raspberry Jam @ the Computer History Museum in Mountain VIew, California I hope to show off 9pi -- Richard Miller's plan9 port to the RaspberryPi. This is a work in progress -- no USB driver as yet but it boots up in seconds, uses its own fossil filesystem, can use the display and so on. Much work remains but if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can come get a taste of plan9 @ the CHM! See the user groups and events forum for details. Don't worry if you miss this one; I will bring this to the next month's meet as well, hopefully with a working USB driver.

[smrz]

Does anyone have a link for this port? I can't find anything but this post on the web... Would love to get plan 9 on my pi.

Tomorrow at the Raspberry Jam @ the Computer History Museum in Mountain VIew, California I hope to show off 9pi -- Richard Miller's plan9 port to the RaspberryPi. This is a work in progress -- no USB driver as yet but it boots up in seconds, uses its own fossil filesystem, can use the display and so on. Much work remains but if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can come get a taste of plan9 @ the CHM! See the user groups and events forum for details. Don't worry if you miss this one; I will bring this to the next month's meet as well, hopefully with a working USB driver.

[Bakul Shah]

Does anyone have a link for this port? I can't find anything but this post on the web... Would love to get plan 9 on my pi.

Tomorrow at the Raspberry Jam @ the Computer History Museum in Mountain VIew, California I hope to show off 9pi -- Richard Miller's plan9 port to the RaspberryPi. This is a work in progress -- no USB driver as yet but it boots up in seconds, uses its own fossil filesystem, can use the display and so on. Much work remains but if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can come get a taste of plan9 @ the CHM! See the user groups and events forum for details. Don't worry if you miss this one; I will bring this to the next month's meet as well, hopefully with a working USB driver.

Still a work in progress. If you already know your way around plan9, the current sources can be found in /n/sources/contrib/miller/9. You can cross build from any existing plan9 machine or 9vx. But it is really not ready for new users.

[9pi]

Still a work in progress.

To be precise, there's no USB support yet, which means no keyboard and mouse, and no ethernet. (Unless you have an existing Plan 9 network, in which case you can import all these from another Plan 9 machine over a ppp connection via the serial port.)

I could put together a "demo" distribution, but I think it would be premature to do this until a USB driver is sorted out. Without a network or GUI, you would be getting a very limited impression of what Plan 9 is about.

[smrz]

Bummer! I've never worked with Plan 9 before, and though that playing with a few Pi's would be a nice introduction. Any suggestions for tutorials / resources / projects to get started with Plan 9?

Still a work in progress.

To be precise, there's no USB support yet, which means no keyboard and mouse, and no ethernet. (Unless you have an existing Plan 9 network, in which case you can import all these from another Plan 9 machine over a ppp connection via the serial port.)

I could put together a "demo" distribution, but I think it would be premature to do this until a USB driver is sorted out. Without a network or GUI, you would be getting a very limited impression of what Plan 9 is about.

[gwoodward]

Hi,

How could I get involved with the port? I was thinking of attempting a port of Inferno.

[Bakul Shah]

Bummer! I've never worked with Plan 9 before, and though that playing with a few Pi's would be a nice introduction. Any suggestions for tutorials / resources / projects to get started with Plan 9?

Start here: http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/plan_9_wiki/
A great resource is this book: Introduction to Operating Systems Abstractions Using Plan 9 from Bell Labs by Ballesteros.
More resources: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/

To get a working installation, download plan9.iso.bz2 from http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/pla ... index.html and install in a virtual machine. I've used Qemu and VirtualBox to good effect.

[Bakul Shah]

Hi,

How could I get involved with the port? I was thinking of attempting a port of Inferno.

See this thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgr ... T_YFup68YU

[9pi]

Just to finish up this thread - Plan 9 for Raspberry Pi is now available, and has its own section under Operating System Distributions in the forum.

As for Inferno, it already runs "hosted" on top of linux on the Pi. Since the architecture-dependent base of native Inferno (drivers, memory management, interrupts) is largely shared with Plan 9, a native version will probably appear before too long.