Installing Plan 9 on Qemu

Plan 9 installs easily under current versions of Qemu and KVM. Here are some detailed instructions. See Plan 9 on Qemu on Windows for installing on Windows with TAP networking.

First install qemu. Optionally, you can install kqemu also. This will give a significant speed advantage. To use KVM, replace calls to qemu by calls to kvm.

Create a disk image, 2Gbytes should be plenty for a simple install.

qemu-img create -f qcow Plan9.qcow.img 2G

Install the image. You probably want to do a simple fossil only install rather than a venti+fossil one---read the papers to discover what the difference is.

This will take several hours as qemu does not support DMA. (Is this still true? Installing under kvm was not that slow for me recently. --rob)

qemu -hda Plan9.qcow.img -cdrom plan9.iso -boot d

During the install you will be prompted for your monitor type---enter:

vesa

Once you have a finished the installation you can boot this image with just:

qemu Plan9.qcow.img;

Once booted you can list the available VESA VGA modes:

aux/vga -m vesa -p 

Before exiting qemu, halt the plan9 filesystem so it can sync its disks:

fshalt