9fib (de-nixified fork of majiru's 9front-in-a-box)

This repo automates setup and local execution of a 9front virtual machine on Arch Linux. Virtual machines run under qemu and connect through drawterm.

The current non-Nix workflow is intentionally narrow:

• host OS: Arch / Omarchy
• guest arch: amd64
• filesystems: hjfs, cwfs, gefs

It is meant to make trying 9front easy, not to be a general-purpose 9front server deployment tool.

Dependencies

Install the host packages first:

sudo pacman -S --needed go qemu-full expect plan9port libisoburn

plan9port provides the drawterm binary used to connect to the 9front guest. libisoburn provides xorriso, which is used for automated FreeBSD installer media.

Setup

Prepare a local disk image with:

bin/setup-vm

That creates 9front.hjfs.amd64.qcow2 in the current directory.

The base release image is cached under:

${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/9fib/releases

The default hjfs disk is a qcow2 overlay backed by that cached release image. If you delete the cached release file, recreate the VM with bin/setup-vm.

Useful variants:

bin/setup-vm --fs cwfs
bin/setup-vm --fs gefs
bin/setup-vm --latest
bin/setup-vm --release 11554
bin/setup-vm --disk ./my-9front.qcow2

To prepare a FreeBSD VM for manual installation:

bin/setup-vm --os freebsd

That downloads the FreeBSD amd64 disc1 installer ISO, creates freebsd.amd64.qcow2, and leaves installation to the user.

To use the current FreeBSD beta installer:

bin/setup-vm --os freebsd --latest

To install FreeBSD automatically with ZFS:

bin/setup-vm --os freebsd --auto-install

The automated FreeBSD installer uses a single-disk ZFS setup, DHCP, hostname freebsd, root password password, and enables sshd.

Running

Start the VM and connect with drawterm:

bin/run-vm

The default account is glenda with password password.

For a terminal-only session:

bin/run-vm --nogui

To boot the FreeBSD installer:

bin/run-vm --os freebsd

For the current FreeBSD beta installer:

bin/run-vm --os freebsd --latest

After installing FreeBSD to the virtual disk, boot from the disk with:

bin/run-vm --os freebsd --freebsd-boot disk

To select another filesystem image or drawterm binary:

bin/run-vm --fs cwfs
bin/run-vm --drawterm /usr/bin/drawterm

To pass a host USB device through to a guest, identify it with lsusb, then use either its bus/address or vendor/product IDs:

bin/run-vm --usb bus=1,addr=4
bin/run-vm --usb vendor=046d,product=c52b

--usb can be repeated for multiple devices. Your user must have permission to access the host USB device, usually through udev rules or by running QEMU with sufficient privileges.

Extra flags are passed through to the Go launcher in run/, so existing flags such as -debug, -m, or -cpu can still be used:

bin/run-vm --nogui -debug -m 2G

Instructions for using rio are in the 9front FQA.

Notes

• arm64 and 386 are not part of the current non-Nix workflow.
• For 9front, --latest uses the rolling https://build.9front.org/9front build stream. For FreeBSD, --latest selects the current configured beta installer.
• The default release pin remains 11554 until it is updated explicitly.