The biggest issue I have with 9front or other Plan9 distribution on a
laptop is the lack of local authentication upon startup; the OS just
trusts that you are whoever you say you are when you boot the system.
If the laptop were stolen or something there is nothing to keep someone
from getting in and accessing all of the data.
It is one thing to do that with a server that is locked in a secure
closet (as was the expected situation for a Plan9 file server back when
it was invented), but for an all-in-one portable system that is more of
a problem.
Has anyone come up with a solution for drive encryption and forced
password authentication upon boot yet, to make it more practical to use
9 directly on a laptop without creating as much of a concern?
On 6/5/25 07:35, Daniel Maslowski via 9fans wrote:
Yea the "another machine" part is the tough bit.
I travel a lot, and I usually have one laptop with me.
Ideally, I want to avoid having two machines, or even systems.
If I can use plan9port to compile the code, that would be ideal.
My currently planned portable setup would be
- Plan 9 in a VM, headless in the background 🧐
- mount 9p from my host machine ✨
- use the editor on my host machine 👩💻
- run a command to recompile 🚀
- (re)run the resulting binary in QEMU 🥳
I expected that to be simpler, and I do know that it's possible.
Just takes time to figure out, so I walk tiny steps every now and then
and get back to other stuff most of the time. 🙃
On Wed, 4 Jun 2025, 23:27 Shawn Rutledge, <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 04, 2025 at 06:05:26PM +0200, Daniel Maslowski via
9fans wrote:
> I am still trying to get a working 9front setup so I can work on
the port.
It's not hard: just dd the iso to a usb stick, boot with it, and
see how
much luck you have with getting the right video mode and a working
network
interface (reading the fqa about that), on whatever spare PC you
want to
try, before attempting to install. Don't like it? try another
machine. ;-)
And https://luksamuk.codes/posts/plan9-setup-rpi.html is a decent
walkthrough of the next steps to get drawterm working etc., regardless
whether you are using a raspberry pi or not. A Pi 4 is actually a
nice
enough substitute for a PC, except for having to trust an SD card
with the
filesystem.
> We used Shawn's setup; I am not there yet.
>
> The workflow was as follows:
> On a Linux machine, QEMU is set up, and another machine running
9front with
> Acme et al serves 9p.
> Editing and recompiling in 9front and then (re)running in QEMU
works fine
> that way, but debugging was tedious.
> On the Linux machine, we stepped through instructions via gdb,
and had to
> reverse lookup the corresponding function.
> With acid on 9front, we could see the counterpart and come to
conclusions.
> Not ideal, but a start.
Yep that's how it was. I recorded some of the gdb work in a
typescript
and took a few notes, so as not to forget everything.
My wife took me to visit her family for a couple of weeks, I only
brought
along one laptop (the Acer with 9front that I took to IWP9, but now
dual-booting Arch as well) and I doubt I will have time for much
hacking
until after I get back on the 16th. I also don't know what I'm
doing, but
figured it might do me some good to learn the risc-v architecture
a bit.
> So I have done a few related things now to help along:
>
> - https://github.com/platform-system-interface/p9aout2elf a tool
to convert
> Plan 9 a.out to ELF (*with* symbols!); so far amd64 only, I'm
working on
> RISC-V 64
> - https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/pull/24261 WIP support
for Plan 9
> RISC-V kernels in radare2
>
> Those tools significantly help with debugging, so one gets to
see the
> symbols in gdb and radare2.
Cool.
It was educational working with you guys that day. Thanks.
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