[9fans] Does Plan 9 work under Microsoft's Hyper-V?

[bituman]

I couldnt got Plan9 to natively run on my machine, so i thought it'd be
a nice 2-in-1 learning experience to get it working under Hyper-V.
Since i wouldnt like the one thing i learn to be: this cant be done, id
like to ask if anyone had succes getting it run with MS virtualization?

Sandor Nagy

[Paweł Lasek]

If the Xen 3.x port is in any shape, it would be a good starting point
for running it under Hyper-V, as it was advertised to support Xen
guests. Also there might be some way to make it emulate a full
machine, but I don't know about that. It certainly would be an
interesting solution for getting Plan 9 into Business - Windows 2008
seems to be fairly well integrated with Hyper-V.

--
Paweł Lasek

[Steve Simon]

I have no idea about Hyper-V, however plan9 does run
under qemu and under vmware on windows. Also a windows
9vx implementation is in progress.

-Steve

[Eris Discordia]

I tried running Plan 9 4e on Microsoft Virtual PC (v6.0.156.0, both 32- and
64-bit versions). It wouldn't work due to a strange problem with (virtual)
disk I/O. Virtual Server 2005 uses similar technology so I think it would
fail, too. Though, I didn't exactly give it a try. Hardware virtualization
often creates more problems that software, right?

--On Wednesday, August 27, 2008 10:02 AM +0200 bituman <bit...@enerla.net>
wrote:

> I couldn't got Plan9 to natively run on my machine, so i thought it'd be a

[Robert Raschke]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 1:17 PM, Eris Discordia
<eris.di...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I tried running Plan 9 4e on Microsoft Virtual PC (v6.0.156.0, both 32- and
> 64-bit versions). It wouldn't work due to a strange problem with (virtual)
> disk I/O. Virtual Server 2005 uses similar technology so I think it would
> fail, too. Though, I didn't exactly give it a try. Hardware virtualization
> often creates more problems that software, right?

The "run from cd" booted up just fine in MS Virtual Server 2005. I
never got round to installing it fully though. If I remember
correctly, I started an install once, but had to turn off disk dma and
then the formatting of a small venti (~3-4GB) took more than two
hours, so I aborted. Got a "faster" machine now, so maybe I'll try
that again.

Robby

[erik quanstrom]

> The "run from cd" booted up just fine in MS Virtual Server 2005. I
> never got round to installing it fully though. If I remember
> correctly, I started an install once, but had to turn off disk dma and
> then the formatting of a small venti (~3-4GB) took more than two
> hours, so I aborted. Got a "faster" machine now, so maybe I'll try
> that again.
>

i didn't think that dma was the default. if it is, i would
think that this would cause more problems than it would
solve. slow is better than not working at all.

- erik

[Robert Raschke]

Running another install into MSVirtualServer R2 SP1 just now with an
old iso had lying around (20070329) and I misremembered. Disk dma had
to be on, otherwise you get lots of i/o errors. It is the copydist
that takes forever. I'll post back once I got it all up. I may try it
with the latest iso as well.

Robby

[Eris Discordia]

It will eventually install but won't get past a specific step after the
installed system is booted. I asked about the problem on 9fans. No
solutions... yet.

Here's the thread: http://9fans.net/archive/2008/01/547

--On Wednesday, August 27, 2008 1:33 PM +0100 Robert Raschke

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 11:17 AM, Eris Discordia
<eris.di...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It will eventually install but won't get past a specific step after the
> installed system is booted. I asked about the problem on 9fans. No
> solutions... yet.
>
> Here's the thread: http://9fans.net/archive/2008/01/547

With the iso I downloaded this week, I also get the issue that Eris points out.

Eris, if you want to give last years iso a try (20070329, it works
perfectly on MS Virtual Server R2 SP1), give me a shout and I'll put
it somewhere you can download it.

Robby

[Eris Discordia]

> Eris, if you want to give last years iso a try (20070329, it works
> perfectly on MS Virtual Server R2 SP1), give me a shout and I'll put
> it somewhere you can download it.

Many thanks for the offer, but I just don't have access to the required
bandwidth. I had downloaded the first ISO image at a facility with a
broadband connection. That luxury is currently out of question for me.
Anyhow, I had gotten Plan 9 running on QEMU until I gave up and just purged
the whole thing.

Microsoft Virtual PC has so far been fine for running FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE,
NetBSD v3.0.1, SuSE Linux v9 and v10, Slackware Linux v10.1, PC-DOS 5.0,
and MS-DOS 6.22. So I guess Plan 9 is expecting something out of the
ordinary, or simply being too pedantic.

--On Friday, August 29, 2008 9:21 AM +0100 Robert Raschke

[David Leimbach]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 6:47 AM, Eris Discordia <eris.di...@gmail.com> wrote:

Eris, if you want to give last years iso a try (20070329, it works
perfectly on MS Virtual Server R2 SP1), give me a shout and I'll put
it somewhere you can download it.

Many thanks for the offer, but I just don't have access to the required bandwidth. I had downloaded the first ISO image at a facility with a broadband connection. That luxury is currently out of question for me. Anyhow, I had gotten Plan 9 running on QEMU until I gave up and just purged the whole thing.

Microsoft Virtual PC has so far been fine for running FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, NetBSD v3.0.1, SuSE Linux v9 and v10, Slackware Linux v10.1, PC-DOS 5.0, and MS-DOS 6.22. So I guess Plan 9 is expecting something out of the ordinary, or simply being too pedantic.

That's one way to look at it, or you can just realize that emulators/virtualization *aren't* the same as real hardware. 

 Real PC hardware is a pain to emulate, because it's not rigidly specified enough.  As a result of this, we know people bother to test things like Virtual PC running FreeBSD and Linux as well as DOS, and then complain to Microsoft when it doesn't work.  Since more of their customers have a use for DOS or FreeBSD or Linux, Microsoft is probably more inclined to fix their Virtualization for them.

I'm afraid Plan 9 doesn't have a market share that's interesting to these companies to fix their virtualization so that all OSes work.  Better is the enemy of good enough after all, and who cares if some obscure OS doesn't work on their virtualization platform.  All they have to do is make the ones people are more likely to pay support to use work.

So while I tend to agree with you that it will likely fall on the Plan 9 community to make this work with Virtual PC, if we choose to care to do so, I wouldn't say it's because Plan 9 is expecting anything out of the ordinary (It works on my PC, the virtualization is the non-ordinary piece).  It might be true that it's being too pedantic for that virtualization package.... It's not a matter of blame though, the two pieces just aren't compatible.

Dave