this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Can you bare metal plan9 on anything? I have only ever seen it in vm.
I have it running on a x86_64 Pentium III server; works great!
That screenshot was actually taken running on bare metal (an old laptop)! Everything works great as long as you don't need a modern web browser or WiFi for anything. I've also gotten it running on a bunch of other random hardware I've had laying around, it's very portable and works fairly well on everything I've messed around with so far. I'm also currently waiting for my 10 gig NIC to arrive so I can use an old machine running 9 I have laying around as a router!
Is it just a generic framebuffer for graphics or are their open source drivers for commercial gpus? I wanted to make a cheap desktop to have a permanent learning environment on but I had trouble finding good information on hardware support. What would you recommend for a system suitable for tinkering?
You'll definitely not be doing any hardware accelerated graphics shenanigans on 9, there isn't really any graphics drivers or anything of that sort, you just get a basic framebuffer and a library to draw basic 2D graphics which can still be plenty if you do some old school software rasterization.
For hardware support you can see an incomplete list for 9front here: https://fqa.9front.org/fqa3.html I'd say you're probably safe to just pick up an old Dell Optiplex and some cheap generic USB peripherals and it'd probably work out of the box. I'd just double check the Ethernet situation so you can have networking since that's kind of the whole appeal of 9. Raspberry Pis are also supported and work fairly well in my testing and 9front provides images for them on their website.
I'm not too concerned about it being limited to 2d graphics. I just wanted to be sure I'd get a display output. I got an old dell lying around. Guess I'll give it a shot. Thanks for the info and recommendation!
Wifi situation been getting better too
More drivers, WPA support, etc (assuming you run 9front)
Need to find the energy to implement some exploit mitigation tech for 9front sometime, I'm afraid to put that shit on the internet, no ASLR even :/
I wouldn't be too worried about it honestly, I doubt anyone is scanning the internet to mess with public 9 machines. If you're worried, just shove them on their own VLAN to keep them separate from the rest of your network.