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Interview with Vita Nuova CEO Michael Jeffrey
Little-Fat-Sheep writes: "Lots of talk on Slashdot and elsewhere lately about the future of Operating Systems being massively distributed. Well, the technology exists for years now in the two operating systems offered by Vita Nuova: Plan9 and Inferno. OSNews features today an interview with Vita Nuova's CEO, Michael Jeffrey."
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How are you going to mention Plan 9 and inferno withough mentioning bell labs?
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
It mentions Bell Labs several times including the relationship between bell labs and Vita Nuova (i.e. bell labs spun off Inferno to Vita Nuova).
-- Find the Truth...
" I believe Inferno achieved what Java set out to do. "
note the capitalization. Plan 9 is open source, but due to some traits in the license, it's not considered Open Source as per the requirements of the OSI. Inferno is open source except for a few core components, which are based on a subscription license model. i'm not sure if the license covering the non-core software is Open Source, although it is open source. the core software is clearly not.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
>>Eventually it gets all pixellated
you're reaching the numeric precision of the hardware. Most fractal viewiers out there have this problem. They may do things in 64 bit math or 128 bit math or use their own custom routines, but eventually you zoom in so far the math falls apart.
Yes. Inferno applications are written in a concurrent programming language called Limbo. the language reference manual is available online, as are varous descriptions of programming in the language (and some other papers as well). the language is C-like in structure, with influences from many other places, like Pascal and Algol. of particular note are channels, a data type for inter-process communication which makes writing multi-threaded and/or distributed apps easier than in maybe any other system. it's a beautiful language.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Plan 9 is open source, but it is not Open Source. that is, it doesn't meet the criterion set forth by OSI for its license to get the "Open Source" mark. you can, however, get full source to Plan 9 for free and use it towards any end, commercial or otherwise.
note also that the commentary you're linking to is commenting on an older version of the Plan 9 license; most (not all) of the issues have been addressed.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Private namespaces -> Inferno gives each user/app a private namespace. If you're not allowed to see a file, it'not in your namespace, so there's no way you can even ask to see it. This is a good example of capabilities-based security. This is lightyears past the MS-DOS idea of each disk partition or network share being painfully appearant to the user.
JIT optimized VM -> DIS, the Inferno VM, is based on a memory machine instead of a stack machine (a la Java and CLR/Mono). This allows for more efficient register allocation durring just-in-time compililation. Stack machines are great for writng smpleinterpreters with small memory footprints. Memoery machines are great for easily recompiling into fast native code. If I could, I'd start on an Open Source VM based on DIS. Toasters are great, but I don't want a crippled VM just so that it's easy to run on an 8-bit microprocessor in a toaster. You guys running SPARC, MIPS, POWER, PPC, IA64, etc. CPUs should notice the performance advantags of DIS more than us poor x86 users because the x86 is pretty register starved.)
Distributed resources -> in Plan 9, there is a crippled user account without a password that pretty much can't doanything but present cryptographic credentials that prove it's doing work on behalf of a priveledged user. This would allow your dnet client to run on your CPU farm, but not actually be able to log in as you if it got compromised. As far as I can tell, the system is very similar to Kerberos with more types ofcredentials and tickets that never expire. I don't like the lack of ticket expiration , but it's better security than almost anything else out there. Most Beowulf implementations use rsh for performance, so you need to isolate the Beowulf compute nodes from anything remotely hostile, since rsh gives you a root prompt without a password based on the source TCP port number.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.