Virtual machines

Plan 9 can be installed on a variety of virtual machines. For the moment, this page collects links to the various pages related to the subject.

9VX

• 9vx provides a Plan 9 kernel running in user-mode.

XEN

• Installing in Xen
• Installing in Xen 3.0

QEMU/KVM

For installation instructions, see

• Installing Plan 9 on Qemu
• Installing Plan B on Qemu

If you configure a cpu server (Configuring a standalone CPU server), you can run it from a terminal by adding a line

console=0

to plan9.ini and invoking the virtual machine with option -nographic. Note that you need to configure Qemu networking to allow connections to the virtual machine.

PARALLELS

See Installing in Parallels Desktop on Mac OS X for installation instructions. There are also some possibly outdated instructions at Plan 9 on Parallels.

Note that <Del> is <fn>+<Bksp>.

VMWARE

• VMWare
• vmware4
• Vmware_playground_for_plan9
• Dual booting bare machine and vmware

VIRTUAL BOX

• installing plan 9 in a virtualbox

Note, in particular, the warning about VirtualBox being often broken, with behavior very dependent on exact versions of things. If at all possible, you are advised to use a different VM.

VIRTUAL BOX on OS X

I used VirtualBox 4.1.6 (with a matching extension pack). This is the latest version at present(2011/11/24). Installed a stock plan9.iso (made on 2011/11/12).

Settings:

• Chipset: PIIX3
• Enable IO APIC
• select both buttons on h/w virtualization
• IDE ctrlr: PIIX4, use host I/O cache
• hard disk on IDE primary master
• cdrom on IDE secondary master
• network: bridge adapter
• Adapter type: intel pro/1000 MT server or desktop
• Enable USB, select USB 2.0

Other settings may also work.

During installation choose Fossil only (I had lot of trouble with fossil + venti, where it dies very early during distcopy). Everything else was basically defaulted.

Even with just fossil I see fossil write errors once in a while but fossil/flchk doesn't show any errors.

Don't forget to turn on venti on reboot (Yon can use p9p venti -- unless you have a physical machine running plan9, running venti natively on the host is faster). For venti add the following to plan9.ini

venti=tcp!<venti-server-ip-addr>!17034

Use the numeric ip-address for your venti-server. and telling fossil to use venti & set up a regular snapshots

fossil/conf /dev/sdC0/fossil > fs.cfg
ed fs.cfg <<EOF
/open/s/-V/-AWP/p
a
fsys main snaptime -a hhmm -s 1440
.
EOF
fossil/conf -w /dev/sdC0/fossil fs.cfg

Replace hhmm with the time you want to take a snapshot.