Guruplug (Plan 9 wiki)

This document is based on the notes I took and found around 9fans and various Plan 9 related sites with respect to getting the Globalscale Guruplug platform booting Plan 9.

STEP 1 - SET UP A CPU/FS/AUTH SERVER

Directions for how to do this are listed in the Configuring a standalone CPU server section of this wiki.

You may already have one of these running, but I've found that in some cases, when trying to compile for ARM, certain packages may be installed that do not work very well. They have to be added to the BUGGERED list in /sys/src/cmd/mkfile.

Example:

	BUGGERED=unix|postscript|upas

Note that upas is not malfunctioning, nor is it true to say that it would not compile on my system. I just did not have upas privileges and could not complete the upas installation. Since I was not concerned with email, I skipped it by placing it on the BUGGERED list.

It is possible to turn off permissions checking or the user you're logged in as to the upas group if needed, but that's beyond the scope of this wiki page.

STEP 2 - BUILD YOUR ARM TOOLCHAIN

Follow Geoff's directions from the 9fans posting here: sheevaplug port available

A slight modification of those instructions is below:

     cd /sys/src/cmd
      for(i in ?c ?a ?l) {
              if(! ~ $i cc rc) @{
                      cd $i
                      mk clean
                      objtype=$cputype mk install
                      mk clean
		}
	}

STEP 3 - POPULATE YOUR ARM TREE

	cd /sys/src
	objtype=arm mk install

If you fail to install something in this step you can try to add names to the BUGGERED list as above and retry the mk install.

STEP 4 - COPY NVRAM FROM YOUR CPU SERVER FOR THE GURUPLUG IMAGE

Part of setting up a CPU server is setting up the nvram of your machine. You should have an "nvram" partition on your boot disk if you followed the standard wiki CPU setup instructions.

Copy this file into /sys/src/9/kw

	dd -if /dev/sdC0/nvram -of /sys/src/9/kw/nvram

Now when you compile your kernel, you'll have a valid nvram file.

STEP 5 - COMPILE THE KW KERNEL

	cd /sys/src/9/kw
	mk 'CONF=plug' install

After this step you now have all the pieces you need to run Plan 9 on an ARM system.

STEP 6 - CONFIGURE PXE TO BOOT YOUR GURUPLUG

In /lib/ndb/local you'll need an entry like the following

	ip=192.168.1.77 sys=bunnyplug dom=bunnyplug.homework.net
		bootf=/arm/9plug
		gw=192.168.1.1
		dns=192.168.1.1
		fs=<YOUR-FS-SERVER>
		auth=<YOUR-AUTH-SERVER>

I'm using a vmware plan 9 CPU AUTH and FS server so I just use the same IP address for the fs and auth items.

PXE needs to be configured as well. In /cfg/pxe you should see a file "example-kw". You may copy this to /cfg/pxe/<your-guruplug-mac-address>

This same filename will be specified as a parameter in the u-boot loader of your guruplug.

STEP 7 - ENSURE FOSSIL IS LISTENING

NOTE: this step will make fossil listen on port 564 without encryption!

	fossil/conf /dev/sdC0/fossil > flproto
	cat >> flproto << EOF
	listen tcp!*!564
	EOF
	fossil/conf -w /dev/sdC0/fossil flproto

STEP 8 - READ MAN PAGE AND SET UP THE GURU PLUG FOR PXE

The booting(8) manpage has instructions for the Marvell Kirkwood CPU Server kernel.

I recommend that you backup your Guruplug's default bootcmd environment variable parameters before setting these, or just skipping the saveenv step that overwrites the defaults.

In case you clobberred your u-boot settings, I'm listing my defaults in case they would work for you to get back into Linux

	bootcmd=${x_bootcmd_ethernet}; ${x_bootcmd_usb}; ${x_bootcmd_kernel}; setenv bootargs ${x_bootargs} ${x_bootargs_root}; bootm 0x6400000;

I don't want to commit my only Guruplug to Plan 9 just yet so I just enter the following manually (cut and paste) each time I want to boot Plan 9.

	setenv bootcmd 'dhcp 0x800000; tftp 0x1000 /cfg/pxe/<MAC>; go 0x800000'
	boot

THANKS

Thanks to the Geoff Collyer, the folks behind Inferno-kirkwood, David du Colombier, and Skip Tavakkolian for their excellent work and notes on getting this platform documented.