Updating an ARM System (Plan 9 wiki)

As described in Staying up to date, any Plan 9 fossil file system can be brought up to date with the sources distribution with this command:

replica/pull -v /dist/replica/network

Historically the update procedure assumes a network with an x86-based server as the main installation machine, which is used in turn to build software for machines of other architectures. For a stand-alone ARM system, some adaptations need to be made.

BUILDING ARM BINARIES

The sources repository used by replica/pull contains compiled binary files (object libraries and executable commands) only for the x86 architecture. If you have an ARM computer such as the Sheevaplug or Raspberry Pi, the pull command will only update the source code, and you will need to recompile anything which has changed by running 'mk install' in the appropriate directory.

OMITTING 386 BINARIES

If your ARM computer is not acting as a server for any x86 machine, you may not want to keep x86 binaries in its local file system. To prevent replica/pull from trying to download these, you can edit the script /rc/bin/replica/pull and insert these two lines just before the last line of the file:

grep -v ' 386/(9|bin|lib|init)' $clientlog >$clientlog.arm
bind $clientlog.arm $clientlog