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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."
click here to read the article without supporting the capitalist pigdogs. no ads. one page. printable, baybee, printable.
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...
It amazes me how long it's taken for these ideas to ferment. I mean I was talking with people about the distributed OS concept back in 96 or so. I have to wonder why the concept has sat mostly unexplored for this long. Perhaps more importantly, I wonder why it's suddenly hot again. Is there some actual practical use for the technology that's bringing it back into the light? Or are people just thinking this is the next logical step of P2P and thinking that it will be hot because P2P is?
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Okay so Plan 9 is cool. Useful ? Probably not as it doesn't have any support or applications of note.
Where as Linux is a poorer OS from a next gen perspective but has the applications and support.
OS/390 is old school but has great memory management, io and SMP etc.
The first two are already open source, the third owned by the Big Blue Linux supporter. Wouldn't it be better to have a directed 2 year plan to create a merged platform ? The reality is that Linux right now is in the Bazaar and to get to that end game we need some form of Cathedral project to guide and drive. But picture the end game, a networked OS, with loads of apps, the best SMP, io, memory and domaining support you can get.
This would be the great killer platform for servers, and a kick-ass gaming platform.
Unfortunately it won't happen because the only people who could really run this successfully would be a combination of Bell Labs and Thomas J Watson. Damn that would be kick-ass, but Big Blue don't seem to want to take the lead in Linux, and the linux community probably wouldn't let them anyway.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
a lot of talk recentlly about massively distributed OSs... but not for the same purposes.
the main talk lately is about distributed file system and processing power and the privacy issues... not technology issues.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I'm a bit confused here. Does Inferno have its own language to be compiled within the VM like Java?
One little nit-pick is that the article mentions both Plan9 and Inferno are not Open Source. Also, its important not to look at the significance of these operating systems as in current market saturation, but what new and exciting features they can bring.
Regarding the 'killer platform', im not sure that Holy Grail exists. However the world proves daily that implementation is more important than design, so just pick what works best for you.
In the interview the CEO says "Neither OS is open source". But the web site has downloads for kernel source. Can anyone guess what he was talking about?
-- Nobody should take away Microsoft's freedom to innovate, particularly since they haven't used it yet
" I believe Inferno achieved what Java set out to do. "
From the Plan 9 FAQ:
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The Plan 9 release is available for free download at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/download.htm
It includes source of the kernel, libraries, and commands for all supported architectures. It also includes complete binaries for the x86 architecture.
Regarding implementation: You can be the judge of whether this sounds like a good idea:
Subject: What GUIs does it support?
The standard interface doesn't use icons or drag-n-drop; Plan 9 people tend to be text-oriented. But the window system, the editor, and the general feel are very mousy, very point-and-click: Plan 9 windows are much more than a bunch of glass TTYs. The system supports the graphics primitives and libraries of basic software for building GUIs.
A screenshot is available at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/screenshot.h
Subject: How do I cut and paste with a 2 button mouse?
Plan 9 really works well only with a three-button mouse. In the meantime, Shift-Right-button will simulate a middle button, but that is inadequate for Acme's chording.
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I'm no expert in all things fractal, but aren't fractals supposed to infinitely repeat? If so, then the fractal program for the Inferno plugin doesn't really generate fractals. Check it out yourself....just keep zooming in. Eventually it gets all pixellated.
If I'm wrong, set me straight and mod me down and explain fractals to me again...
Oh, I'm not asking them to change it. If a name like that already has recognition, it could be beneficial to stick with it. But why choose the hard path and work against the marketing, if you can actually go with it.. I'm just cursing the overall lack of thinking and planning beforehand and not just in this case but in many open and closed source projects I've seen.
And the word 'inferno' itself. As the dictionary says, it's a word describing a hot, hell-ish place. Use this product and see your Athlon melt, hard disks fail and your system doomed to deepest parts of heck. I'm kinda curious, how you come to thinking of fast with this word..? All I can think of is flames. Probably something to do with the movie 'Towering Inferno'.
Well, anyway, this is getting a bit off-topic already..
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
Because you can look at the code does not mean it passes the criteria of the OSD or the FSF's guidelines. Put some Plan9 code in your 'Hello World' app and im sure you will be hearing from someone...
>>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.
Correction: plan nine ISN'T open source according to Richard Stallman.
- the plan nine license requires all changes be sent back to them;
- you (possibly) can't sell your code for a profit;
- lots of other problems with the license. (see here for Stallman's take on it.)
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Yeah I know, I talked about the idea with people, heard about Plan 9 and thought, "somebody's on it" and left it alone :).
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Um,
It's not a marketing organization, it's Bell Labs Research... the same guys who named an older OS 'Unix' as a pun on Multics. If somebody happens to find their stuff useful, that's great, but that's not really why they do it or name it. Personally, I'm grateful for what they've put together over the years, it's even helped pay the bills, so go easy on them will you?
the protocol, Styx, is very efficient with its bandwidth; very little overhead (it's more latency sensative than bandwidth sensative). of course, if you're pumping mpeg movies around, there's not much to be done about that...
any connection in the system can be optionally securely hashed and/or encrypted, using well-known algorithms like sha, rc4, des, or idea (among others). authentication is based on a public key model.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Please reverify the current licensing. It has been changed since RMS wrote that. Vita Nuova paraphrases the current license as such:
The full text of the Plan 9 Open Source Licence can be found at the Bell Labs Plan 9 site. The licence is similar to many Open Source licences.
The main points are:
-You can modify, copy and distribute the source code as you wish.
-There are no royalty payments on the distribution.
I believe there is a clause, or combinations of clauses, that require you to provide Lucent with source if you distribute binaries only. Sort of looks like a semi-BSDified GPL. Please correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm not completely fluent in legalese.
See Microsoft and modular argument. Linux is modular (not that nice an impl IMO), so are the mainframe architectures. Only have one proc ? Don't install SMP. Don't need domaining, don't use it. Don't need X,Y,Z then don't use them. Having a standard OS platform from which you can build your targetted OS is the approach I was talking about. In the same way as you don't compile the ISA support into Linux if you don't need it.
OSes should be modular, the aim should be to get the best modules available from the best people to create the most flexible platform.
One size does not fit all, just look at the size of the SUSE distro.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
We have customers in 50+ countries in every continent, except Antarctica.
Yet another company that writes off an entire continent. McMurdoans are tired of being the niche-too-small-to-consider.
When we talk about "penguin power" down here, it's got nothing to do with cheap CDs from LinuxCentral.
Why does this article appears under 'Patent pending' topic?
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
I decided to download the IE Inferno plugin and run the demos. I was really impressed with the performance. It really seemed much faster than any java applets I've used. And the download times were very short. It looks like a really cool system. But I really doubt it will be used widely. It's been around for a long time and I would venture to guess that only a relative few have ever heard of it. Too bad.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
The folks at Bell Labs pick names like "Plan 9" and "Inferno" for exactly the reasons you say they shouldn't. From http://www.cs.hut.fi/~kny/inferno/background.html:
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
Here is the pretty much identical article published in Phrack for easy online reading.
Its a good read and shows that while Inferno implements encyption and other security measures, it is not very secure. The author of the article has written a login utility and password cracker for Inferno however his site seems to be down, or temporarily empty i guess, at the moment. It doesnt really cover plan9, just a mention.
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i've responded to this article several times in several forums. the basic summary of the article is "if you mis-configure something you've installed as root, you can make bad things happen". well, gee, thanks. there's nothing specific to inferno here. inferno itself, either installed on raw hardware (like a normal OS) or hosted on top of another OS installed properly, as per the directions is quite secure, and does not have any known holes in it, nor does it expose any in the underlying system. you are instructed to install the installation as a user other than root - the fact that the author of the 2600 article gets it wrong from step 0 sort of taints his findings.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Well, now that you asked, everyone at Bell labs supposedly uses it.
It's not clear if you know this or not, but the name refers to Dante's Inferno, where disgruntled Italian poet Dante ventures into Hell in a quest to figure out 'What It's All About'(TM).
Similarly 'Limbo', 'Styx', 'Charon' and certainly many other various bits of the Inferno system are references to that work.
If I remember correctly, contrary to the typical image of 'Hell', fire serves primarily as a punishment for the lustful. Perhaps this is a convoluted way of selling with sex?
Then again, requiring people to understand symbolism in medival literature probably isn't very good marketing either.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Java has become a ubiquitous development language on devices as diverse as mainframes and mobile phones. Inferno on the other hand has bugger all.
Like me saying "I believe that Fluffy dinosaurs rule the world" it says more about the gullibility of the believer than the statement.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
I would like to highlight some of the good and bad points of Plan 9 and Inferno that were not mentioned in the interview.
/net directory (http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/3/ip.html). You open sockets by writing strings to control files. Sockets are created as dynamic subdirectories in the /net and controlled by writing to additional control files.
/net directory, then it absolutely can not access your disk or any other functionality. If you hide the /net/udp subdirectory, the process will not be able to use UDP, never.
/net, then you can have any number or restrictions or augmentations to this in the form other file systems. You can just bind them as a stack, where the upper directories selectively hide or create new file names to the hierarchy.
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The soul of these systems are the protocols 9P, (the new version will be renamed 2000P) and Styx, even more than the actual OS implementations. The protocol is a bit like raising the abstraction level from TCP "transport" layer to somewhere closer to the "session" layer, although the OSI terminology does not fit very well.
First important idea of the protocol is, that all functionality or "objects" is mounted remotedly and bound locally as directories, called "file systems" in Plan 9 parlance.
This means, that naming, user rights management, authentication, encryption and all that which f.ex. CORBA2 provides as complex badly interoperable abstract extensions are there with strict binary interoperability for all heterogenous environments. Of course multiplexing and streaming is there, because you have a set of bidirectional files or "named pipes", if you will.
Note that all this is independent of the programming language. There are C and Java libraries for accessing 9P or Styx objects.
An example: the access to TCP/IP functionality is a
The second major point is process security. The file system name spaces are per process. If you only give a process the
The third point is related to second: inheritance or "stack directories" or "union directories". You can have a base file system like
You can give the stack to the name space of any process. Now some of the original names are visible and data to them goes transparently to the original implementation process. Some names are new, and data is routed to the modification implementation. Some of that may be redirected to the original names after checks or modifications.
And the iplementations can be mounted from anywhere on the network. You can have several machines running several OS' and programming languages with 9P/Styx, and they all are mounted, bound and stacked to one directory, say "/service", for your chosen client process, which does not see the configuration of the system.
For example low level "device" file systems, see
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/3/INDEX.ht
and for higher level file example systems
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/4/INDEX.ht
or in Plan 9
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/3/INDEX.html
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/4/INDEX.html
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
OK, and the bad news:
It is somewhat difficult to port existing Unix applications to Plan 9. There is a POSIX compliance APE environment, but its use id discouraged in the Plan 9 cimmunity. And the environment is full of diffrent "/services" that you should use instead of POSIX system calls to integrate well.
Inferno VM is currently heavily oriented to one programming language, Limbo. There are projects to run Java on the virtual machine, but they are not exactly production quality or marketable. And the philosophies again clash: you should use the existing "/service" components, not the extensive Java environment libraries. If you are a customer of Vita Nuova, you can get the C source to the Inferno environment, and program in C, too.
Lack of applications is obvious. There are development tools of course, and a rudimentary Web browser, but not much else.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Private Namespaces for Linux
1 2a .htm
http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=1782/ddj0112a/01
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi