Preliminary Notes: Minix on Qemu

modified: 19 Jun 2004

Preliminary Notes: Minix on Qemu

Javen Thyme wrote to ASW on 17 Jun 2004:

I have successfully used Minix 2.0.4 on qemu, the dynamic translator.
I used the same disk image that I used on Bochs.  qemu works great
except that it can't detect the geometry of the disk image for some
reason so I had to pass the -hdachs option to qemu (full command line
is: qemu -m 16 -hda minix204.img -hdachs 200,16,63).  Networking did
not work with qemu however.  I traced down the problem, it is related
to the Bochs "tx start, dev in reset" PANIC message.  I have a patch
for qemu that lets minix use the network card anyways, but I was told
that the patch was not committed to qemu because it is a minix bug and
that I should fix minix.  Minix works great in any case.  If you are
interested in having a page with step-by-step instructions to using
Minix with qemu, let me know and I'll write one or help write one.

My reply, and some further notes:

I'm very pleased to hear this! Yes, if you are willing to write up
some kind of step-by-step instructions I would definitely post it on my
site. In fact, with your permission I'll make a preliminary page with the
content of your current message (permission was granted, this is it).

There is a fix for the Minix dp8390 initialization bug that seemed to be
the cause of the "tx start, dev in reset" message in Bochs. I created a
fixes directory for Minix 2.0.4:
http://minix1.bio.umass.edu/pub/minix.2.0/2.0.4/fixes/
It now contains dp8390fx.tar.Z and cronfix.tar.Z.

Javen reports that this does solve that problem.