Hi everyone, I know this has been discussed a couple of times on the list; but the current situation is that Plan 9 is unable to detect an ethernet card when run on the Parallels [1] Virtual Machine for Mac OS X.
Parallels emulates a standard NE2000 clone (RTL8029 to be precise), which Plan 9 supports. This issue was apparently analyzed some time ago, the conclusion of which was that Parallels does not allow direct PCI bus scanning, which results in Plan 9 being unable to detect the ethernet card. Some patches [2] were released to correct this, but these set of patches do not work with the current Plan 9 sources (as of May 22, 2007) - they even fail to compile. Upon diff'ing the patches with the official Plan 9 sources it seems that some of it has already been incorporated into the mainstream sources. I even see this comment in /sys/src/9/pc/ether2000.c: "Parallels has buf[0x0E] == 0x00 whereas real hardware usually has 0x57." which seems to indicate that Plan 9 does support direct PCI bus scanning (or whatever, I am not familiar with device-driver programming!); but the fact is that it does not. I am sure that a lot of us will be really grateful if this issue is fixed. Parallels provides excellent performance on the Mac OS X and is really the only option for the most of us on Intel Macs. Needless to say, I am willing to provide whatever support is required in terms of testing to fix this issue. Cheers, -- Anant Narayanan [1] http://http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/sr/ (See table for Guest Hardware Specifications) [2] http://www.tip9ug.jp/who/leimy/parallels.html
