[9fans] vmware 5.0

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Tim Newsham

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Aug 15, 2005, 11:07:49 PM8/15/05
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I just tried loading up vmware 5 and booting a plan9 in vmware.
Ugh, the screen doesnt update properly. I see the cursor and
some of the window borders and scroll bars. The main parts of
the window never seem to refresh.

Has anyone played with this much? Are there any known work-arounds?

Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/

Prem Mallappa

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Aug 18, 2005, 4:58:08 AM8/18/05
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Hi Tim
I faced the same problem, no solution exists so far , i tried in VMWare
community no luck
Now back with VMWare 4.5.2 build 8848 with vmware-any-any-93 patch. on a
AMD64


Thanks
- prem

Russ Cox

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Aug 21, 2005, 4:19:33 PM8/21/05
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> Has anyone played with this much?
> Are there any known work-arounds?

there are no known work-arounds.
i asked vmware for documentation, was promised it,
didn't get it, tried to follow up once, and then
dropped it. i don't care enough. qemu with
the kqemu patch on linux is plenty fast for me.
even plain qemu is pretty fast.

russ

Ronald G Minnich

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Aug 23, 2005, 12:20:12 PM8/23/05
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Russ Cox wrote:
> qemu with
> the kqemu patch on linux is plenty fast for me.
> even plain qemu is pretty fast.


yup. I'm done with vmware as well. When I can't use xen, I use qemu, and
it's just fine.

Plus, you can make qemu better, and you can't make vmware better. vmware
just does not care about Plan 9, for good reasons.

I just don't see any point in vmware any more for Plan 9 users.

ron

Gorka guardiola

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Aug 23, 2005, 1:45:14 PM8/23/05
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What about windows?. Qemu is flaky on windows yet and xen doesnt exist...

On 8/23/05, Ronald G Minnich <rmin...@lanl.gov> wrote:


> Russ Cox wrote:
> I just don't see any point in vmware any more for Plan 9 users.


--
- curiosity sKilled the cat

Ronald G Minnich

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Aug 23, 2005, 1:55:27 PM8/23/05
to
Gorka guardiola wrote:
> What about windows?. Qemu is flaky on windows yet and xen doesnt exist...

lucky me! I keep forgetting about windows, except when it does something
like take the entire LANL network down ...
http://lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com/2005/08/major-disruption-in-internet-service.html

Still, I think you're better off putting effort into helping qemu than
trying to make vmware work, because vmware (for sound business reasons,
I"m sure) is not going to help plan 9.

ron

Steve Simon

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Aug 23, 2005, 2:56:18 PM8/23/05
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> What about windows?. Qemu is flaky on windows yet and xen doesnt exist...

Sadly its worse than that, a port of WinXP was done to xen
but licensing restrictions mean it cannot be released.

-Steve

Devon H. O'Dell

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Aug 23, 2005, 3:08:49 PM8/23/05
to
On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 07:55:30PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote:
> > What about windows?. Qemu is flaky on windows yet and xen doesnt exist...
>
> Sadly its worse than that, a port of WinXP was done to xen
> but licensing restrictions mean it cannot be released.
>
> -Steve

It's a big pity since microsoft obviously has a vested interest
in Xen (google for xen site:research.microsoft.com yields
interesting results), but it's really improbable that they'd
ever release a patch for paid licenses or sell packages for it.
My guess is that they are simply interested for a VMWare ESX
competitor in VirtualPC.

--Devon

Gorka guardiola

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Aug 23, 2005, 3:27:05 PM8/23/05
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I meant as a host. I believe you are talking about running windows
inside xen. I was
talking about running xen inside windows (with plan 9...).

Scott Stout

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Aug 23, 2005, 3:29:32 PM8/23/05
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"A data type extension for XML and table manipulation (formerly known
as Xen and as X#):"

-http://research.microsoft.com/Comega/

scott

Devon H. O'Dell

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Aug 23, 2005, 3:39:47 PM8/23/05
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On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 02:28:59PM -0500, Scott Stout wrote:
> "A data type extension for XML and table manipulation (formerly known
> as Xen and as X#):"
>
> -http://research.microsoft.com/Comega/
>
> scott

Did you read any other links?

research.microsoft.com/~tharris/
research.microsoft.com/research/sv/vexedd/
research.microsoft.com/~helenw/papers/vground.pdf

These are before and after the link you pasted, respectively,
in my google search results.

-Devon



> On 8/23/05, Devon H. O'Dell <dod...@offmyserver.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 07:55:30PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote:

> > > > What about windows?. Qemu is flaky on windows yet and xen doesnt exist...
> > >

Latchesar Ionkov

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Aug 23, 2005, 3:48:18 PM8/23/05
to
I don't think you can run xen inside Windows. Xen is always in control of
the hardware, it can let some of the domains to access some of it directly,
but the MMU and the interrupts are always handled by Xen.

Lucho

On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 02:26:27PM -0500, Gorka guardiola said:
> I meant as a host. I believe you are talking about running windows
> inside xen. I was
> talking about running xen inside windows (with plan 9...).
>
> On 8/23/05, Steve Simon <st...@quintile.net> wrote:

> > > What about windows?. Qemu is flaky on windows yet and xen doesnt exist...
> >

> > Sadly its worse than that, a port of WinXP was done to xen
> > but licensing restrictions mean it cannot be released.
> >
> > -Steve
> >
>
>

rattan

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Aug 23, 2005, 3:54:38 PM8/23/05
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I need some help in understnading the difference
between proccreate() and threadcreate(). What
are the scenario where usage of one is better than
the other?

-ishwar


andrey mirtchovski

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Aug 23, 2005, 4:01:33 PM8/23/05
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Brantley Coile

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Aug 23, 2005, 4:02:34 PM8/23/05
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Both share address space, but proccreate creates another process.
This process can block on doing IO or some other system call that will
block the progress of the process. Threads are co-routines in a
single process. None of them will run if the process blocks on, say,
a read. So, proccreate processes to do the IO and have them use
channels to send messages to worker threads.

Sape has a good paper on all this, as is Rob's paper on Newsqueak.

Russ Cox

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Aug 23, 2005, 4:03:01 PM8/23/05
to

see http://plan9.bell-labs.com/~rsc/thread/ and
read the introduction to alef by bob flandrena
linked there.

in terms of trite academic examples,

int x;
void inc(void*) { x=x+1; }
void
main(void)
{
int i;
for(i=0; i<10; i++)
threadcreate(inc, nil, STACK);
while(x < 10)
yield();
print("everyone finished\n");
}

is correct (though tortuous) code.
using proccreate would introduce
the usual race.

russ

Ronald G Minnich

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Aug 23, 2005, 4:24:09 PM8/23/05
to
I should probably mention here that once the VT and Pacifica become
widely available, you'll be able to boot unmodified plan 9 as a xen
guest ...

ron

Gorka guardiola

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Aug 23, 2005, 4:25:40 PM8/23/05
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And windows.

On 8/23/05, Ronald G Minnich <rmin...@lanl.gov> wrote:

LiteStar numnums

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Aug 24, 2005, 11:35:39 AM8/24/05
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What, you don't like Hungarian notation, multiple calling methods,
bizzare & inconsitent function names and overly bloated libraries?
Sheesh, what do you think this is {Plan9 | Unix | OpenVMS}?

On 8/24/05, Francisco Ballesteros <capt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> seems that we should probably switch to linux VMs as well.
> At least, we wont have to program with damn ms apis.


--
The subject of this essay (the Myth of Sisyphus) is precisely
this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact
degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd. The
principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat,
what he believes to be true must determine his action.
Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his
conduct. It is legitimate to wonder, clearly and without
false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance
requires forsaking as rapidly possiblean imcompre-
hensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men
inclined to be in harmony with themselves.
<< Albert Camus>>

Martin C. Atkins

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Aug 24, 2005, 10:42:37 PM8/24/05
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On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:48:56 -0400 Latchesar Ionkov <lu...@gmx.net> wrote:
> I don't think you can run xen inside Windows. Xen is always in control of
> the hardware, it can let some of the domains to access some of it directly,
> but the MMU and the interrupts are always handled by Xen.

I've been wondering if the techniques that colinux uses to run Linux
inside windows could also be used to make Xen in Windows possible.

However, I have no real details about what exactly those techniques are,
so this is pure speculation!

Martin
--
Martin C. Atkins mart...@parvat.com
Parvat Infotech Private Limited http://www.parvat.com{/,/martin}

Tim Newsham

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Aug 25, 2005, 12:39:16 AM8/25/05
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> I've been wondering if the techniques that colinux uses to run Linux
> inside windows could also be used to make Xen in Windows possible.

I'm sure you could take the xen dom0<->domU interface and use
it to allow domU's to be run on top of win32 (or the NT kernel, or
any other kernel, for that matter). If you didn't want to interpret
the cpu instructions you would need a little hook in the native kernel
to catch trap instructions and handle page faults. If you wanted to
emulate the cpu (ie. bochs/flex86/qemu) you could directly provide
a xen "machine." Definitely not a trivial undertaking, though.

> Martin C. Atkins mart...@parvat.com

Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/

Vester Thacker

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Aug 27, 2005, 5:53:44 AM8/27/05
to
On 8/25/05, Martin C. Atkins <mart...@parvat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:48:56 -0400 Latchesar Ionkov <lu...@gmx.net> wrote:
> > I don't think you can run xen inside Windows. Xen is always in control of
> > the hardware, it can let some of the domains to access some of it directly,
> > but the MMU and the interrupts are always handled by Xen.
>
> I've been wondering if the techniques that colinux uses to run Linux
> inside windows could also be used to make Xen in Windows possible.

Jun Okamoto is a colinux developer and a fellow Plan 9er, I'll be sure
to mention your comments to him at the next tip9ug meeting. Jun can be
reached at: oka...@digitalinfra.co.jp.

More about Jun at: http://www.colinux.org/?section=devteam
Btw Jun, also, owns plan9.jp domain. :-)

--vester

Vester Thacker

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Aug 27, 2005, 6:01:59 AM8/27/05
to
On 8/27/05, Vester Thacker <vester....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Jun Okamoto is a colinux developer and a fellow Plan 9er, I'll be sure
> to mention your comments to him at the next tip9ug meeting. Jun can be

Oops, that's Jun Okajima not Okamoto. *sigh* Sorry, Jun.

--vester

Jun OKAJIMA

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Aug 27, 2005, 8:36:04 AM8/27/05
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I think it is possible to run Dom0 of Xen on the top of Windows, without VT.
The biggest issue would be not technical one, but just who will do it.

So, we are welcome if you would port Xen to Windows using "Cooperative
Virtual Machine" technology, which Dan Aloni has invented. But dont expect
we will do it, especially under the situation that we realize that once VT
becomes major, CVM becomes obsolete. And paravirtualization, which is the key
point of Xen in the technological aspect also would become obsolete, although
Xen has hopeful future in business aspect.


--- Okajima, Jun. Tokyo, Japan.

Jun OKAJIMA

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Aug 27, 2005, 10:02:24 AM8/27/05
to

And another way is, you make coPlan9, which
uses same CVM way on Plan9. This is a simpler way,
if you just want to run only Plan9.


--- Okajima.

koka...@hera.eonet.ne.jp

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Aug 27, 2005, 11:48:25 AM8/27/05
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> if you just want to run only Plan9.

Actually, I never understand such kind of attempts.
What is the merit to use mutiple OSs on a machine?
>From a bad humor sense, I can realise it only for saving
power...

Once, I thought it'd be nice if I could use Xen for Linux and Plan 9
web server to use UTF-8 encoded our page. However, I realised
it not so essential after that. Now, I'm thinking it I need Windows,
lets have a machine for it, if I need Plan 9 lets have three machine
for it, etc. Machines are not expensive these days, son that must
be only for saving power for mother earth.☺

Kenji

Steve Simon

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Aug 27, 2005, 1:34:35 PM8/27/05
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Re: forign OS servers

I have never tried this but I have read that one can
run Windows terminal server and terminal client on a
WinXP machine. If you then run vnc server on it you can
have multiple users connecting with VNC, each running a
seperate Windows GUI sessions - IE a single XP machine
can become an IE6 server.

I tried to get Linux and Xvnc to cooperate with plan9
but never got the cut and paste buffers to synchronise
properly, perhaps things have changed.

-Steve

koka...@hera.eonet.ne.jp

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Aug 27, 2005, 9:23:44 PM8/27/05
to
Last night I must have been too sleepy. I can't read my own
posting this morning.☺ Then, I'll try once more.

> if you just want to run only Plan9.

Actually, I never understand such kind of attempts.
What is the merit to use mutiple OSs on a machine?

>From a bad humor sense, I can realize it only for saving
power...

Once, I thought it'd be nice if I could use Xen for Linux and Plan 9

web server to use UTF-8 encoded our page. However, I realized
it not so essential after that. Now, I'm thinking like this: if I need
Windows, let's have a machine for it. If I need Plan 9 let's have
three machine for it, etc. Machines are cheeper these days,
so it must be only for saving power for mother earth.☺

Better?

I'm not offending the one machine model for Plan 9 from the
view point of more convenience to more people. However, I think
Geoff's effort should be payed more attention by more Plan 9ers.

Kenji

Brantley Coile

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Aug 28, 2005, 8:07:27 AM8/28/05
to
i too am both curious as to the motivations for VM and completely open
minded with no preconceived notions about VM. except my aversion to
hype. but hype is independent from the quality of an idea.

i was asking Friday here at work, what are the modivations behind VM?
the only answers that were offered were variations on the ability to
rent someone a machine that has root access without having as many
machines are renters. the earliest VM i know of is VM/CMS, from IBM,
which is still used today. its purpose was to provide early
timesharing, and was also used to debug MVS. so those are two
motivation, although Xen can't be used for debugging OSes since it's a
paravirtual machine. i don't think VMware would be too good either
because it rewrites parts of your code. maybe that's not a problem in
practice.

maybe Ron can give us insight into the motivations for using VM.

lu...@proxima.alt.za

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Aug 28, 2005, 9:06:43 AM8/28/05
to
> i too am both curious as to the motivations for VM and completely open
> minded with no preconceived notions about VM. except my aversion to
> hype. but hype is independent from the quality of an idea.

I understood that IBM's motive for VM was to allow different OSes to
co-exist on a single hardware platform. That the same OS also managed
to co-exist with multiple instances of itself was an added bonus and
greatly simplified the multitasking process.

Basically, there were radical incompatibilies between successive OS
releases from IBM (you may recall those days as being a quick
succession of software discoveries/inventions, unmatched by recent
developments) and IBM could not compel users to rewrite their
applications, no matter how exciting the new platform. In fact, I
suspect IBM themselves made good use of the backwards compatibility
they provided with VM.

By providing VM capabilities _at_the_hardware_level_ IBM could entice
customers to upgrade and thus appreciate the improvements in the newer
equipment. The enormous investment of man power as well as
intellectual effort involved in producing custom applications made
this critical.

We live in a different world, today, with disposable equipment on
every desk. But there is a price tag and it's not just higher
electricity bills. For example, disk warranties. Ten years ago you
could buy a 2 Gig drive with a lifetime guarantee (rough guess, I
can't recall very accurately that far back), now you _expect_ you 320
Gig drive to pack up on you within two years. What happens to the 320
Gig of data you entrusted to the drive, then?

I would much rather have a single, reliable computer with the
essential instruction set (I'm not exclusively sold on RISC, but I do
think it makes a lot more sense) and replaceable peripherals than
invest in the latest, greatest Wintel box with the fanciest, most
irrelevant multimedia instruction set in the dual-core CPU and a
Winmodem for my Internet connectivity :-(

But ranting isn't going to help.

++L

Martin Harriss

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Aug 28, 2005, 9:41:26 AM8/28/05
to
See the following paper (by a colleague) for more than you wanted to
know about the development of VM. It was, in the beginning, a skunk
works project.

http://pucc.Princeton.EDU/~melinda/25paper.pdf

Martin

Ronald G Minnich

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Aug 28, 2005, 10:08:17 AM8/28/05
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koka...@hera.eonet.ne.jp wrote:

> Actually, I never understand such kind of attempts.
> What is the merit to use mutiple OSs on a machine?

I do all me development on my laptop, and sometimes need to test
linux/plan9 working together.

ron

Ronald G Minnich

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Aug 28, 2005, 10:20:33 AM8/28/05
to
Brantley Coile wrote:

> i was asking Friday here at work, what are the modivations behind VM?

I forgot the other one. Drivers, drivers, drivers. I can run Plan 9 on
machines that I don't have time/brains to write drivers for. This is
particularly interesting with a 1024-node cluster here called Pink; I
can run Plan under Linux on 1024 nodes and do some kind of scaling
tests. I can also run 10,240 instances of Plan9 on that machine (VM,
right?) and at least see what kinds of things break when you have a
10240 node Plan 9 cluster. Of course, it's not going to run at speed,
but you can still learn a thing or two.

The only interconnect on Pink is Myrinet. Maybe I should write Myrinet
drivers for Plan 9, but even if I did ...

There's infiniband. I don't want to write IB drivers for Plan 9, at
least not at present. They're very complex and unsettled.

So, the basic idea is that VM lets you run OSes on machines that
otherwise it would be very hard to get to, and use many more processors
than you have in reality.

Also, booting Plan 9 in a second is nice when you're in developer mode.
Skipping 9load is a good thing, all the way around. Kernel crashes are
painless.

True story: I went to IBM Palo Alto in 1990 to talk about various
supercomputing things and the issue of AIX/370 came up. AIX had always
run under VM to that point. There was really some question about whether
any living person knew enough about the IBM I/O channels to make AIX
native. VM knew the tricks; did any human know the tricks? Nobody knew.
IBM had kind of screwed themselves on this score, as VM went
closed-source in 1982, and the entire external VM community no longer
knew enough to help.

[[Another argument for open source: your company might forget how your
own software works, but the larger community might remember. This type
of forgetfulness happens way more often than you might think. ]]

To this day, at least Linux is not native, or so I understand; Linux on
the zSeries always runs under VM. Again, feature: IBM has shown cases
where 7,000 or more instances of Linux can be running on a zSeries
machine small enough to fit in your kitchen -- air-cooled at that. No
need to buy rackfuls of machines in that case!

ron

Ronald G Minnich

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Aug 28, 2005, 10:26:04 AM8/28/05
to
Martin Harriss wrote:
> See the following paper (by a colleague) for more than you wanted to
> know about the development of VM. It was, in the beginning, a skunk
> works project.
>
> http://pucc.Princeton.EDU/~melinda/25paper.pdf


Great paper, also details the "go closed source" decision in 1982, which
I doubt IBM would do today.

ron

Ronald G Minnich

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Aug 28, 2005, 10:25:36 AM8/28/05
to
another true story. IBM really knows emulation. At E.I. Dupont, where as
a teenager I was a computer operator, we had (as of 1975) the last
vacuum tube computer in the US. It was a 705 (NOT 704). It ran payroll.

Oops, vacuum tubes were getting hard to get. So Dupont got a 7080 (NOT
7090). It emulated a 705.

Oops, 7080 was expensive to maintain. So Dupont got a 360, emulates
7080, emulating 705.

Oh, heck, 360 went off support. So, on our 370/158, we emulated 360,
emulating 7080, emulating 705. This was really emulation! virtual card
punches, virtual card readers!

Then they rewrote the payroll system to run native. "I'm sure there are
some bugs in there, but I can't find them," the programmer told me, on
saturday at about 2 am. "We're going live next week".

2 weeks later, all us weekend dudes got a 4x-larger paycheck than we
were supposed to.

Geez, I hope nobody from Dupont comes after me for telling this story!

ron

koka...@hera.eonet.ne.jp

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Aug 28, 2005, 12:28:13 PM8/28/05
to
I'm not an expert of this. However, I think I know the motivation
of IBM's VM attempt. Because they decided their main job as
"ON DEMAND" business. To do this, they need such a frexible
mechanism to offer various on demand, on line business.

However, this is Plan 9 community. Is their anyone trying to
make on demand business? ☺

By the way, anyone Plan 9ers here is invlolved in the development
of DeepMail?

Kenji

Ronald G Minnich

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Aug 28, 2005, 12:44:06 PM8/28/05
to
koka...@hera.eonet.ne.jp wrote:

> However, this is Plan 9 community. Is their anyone trying to
> make on demand business? ☺


I'd just like somebody to continue to pay for Plan 9 work :-)

ron

Latchesar Ionkov

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Aug 28, 2005, 2:17:32 PM8/28/05
to
Another good thing about VMs is that you can migrate them to another server
if you want to service the one that they are running on...

Thanks,
Lucho

On Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 08:04:34AM -0400, Brantley Coile said:
> i too am both curious as to the motivations for VM and completely open
> minded with no preconceived notions about VM. except my aversion to
> hype. but hype is independent from the quality of an idea.
>

> i was asking Friday here at work, what are the modivations behind VM?

> the only answers that were offered were variations on the ability to
> rent someone a machine that has root access without having as many
> machines are renters. the earliest VM i know of is VM/CMS, from IBM,
> which is still used today. its purpose was to provide early
> timesharing, and was also used to debug MVS. so those are two
> motivation, although Xen can't be used for debugging OSes since it's a
> paravirtual machine. i don't think VMware would be too good either
> because it rewrites parts of your code. maybe that's not a problem in
> practice.
>
> maybe Ron can give us insight into the motivations for using VM.

> To: 9f...@cse.psu.edu
> Subject: Re: [9fans] Xen for Windows(Was:vmware 5.0)
> Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 10:22:55 +0900
> From: koka...@hera.eonet.ne.jp

Brantley Coile

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Aug 28, 2005, 8:28:38 PM8/28/05