Slashdot Mirror
Driving Plan 9
Glenda_lives_on writes "OSnews has an alternative OS review on Plan 9. Plan 9 is a research OS produced by Bell Labs. It was open sourced a few years back, and has enjoyed a revival of sorts. Los Alamos National Labs is continuing to favor Plan 9 for their new generation of super computing because its the fastest thing out there. I have downloaded and ran Plan 9 before. In fact the Plan 9 live cd sits here on my desk. Its not an operating system for noobs however, and lacks some graphical refinement. Plan 9 is a very cool and a interesting test drive however. Its definitely worth the price of admission (free) for exploring, and education."
The "everything is a file" metaphor of Unix was revolutionary at the time, and Plan 9 taking it a little further really does little to advance the state of the art.
What was good about the "everything is a file" metaphor was not the "file" part, but the "everything is a...." part.
What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system. It would be something like a Lisp OS but with an object database type file system. I think some have existed in academia, but I've never looked into them.
Really cool how _everything_ was a file.
To start a program on some machine, he would cd to some directory corresponding to the machine. I don't remember exactly, but this directory had files corresponding to "exe", "stdin", and "stdout" among others. To start a job, the program was just copied to the exe file. And then if you looked at the "stdout" file, the output from the running job was there. Now you can imagine how launching a job on thousands of machines and collecting the output becomes really trivial.
I got the impression that this was sort of like the Linux /proc filesystem, but expanded to work seamlessly across a cluster and with more functionality.
Plan9 runs on Xenopix DVD. Xenoppix runs Plan9 on anonymous PC.
h tml
http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/xen/index-en.
Xenoppix is a combination of Virtual Machine Monitor "Xen" and 1CD/DVD "KNOPPIX".
It runs Plan9 and NetBSD on Xen-DomU(GuestOS) and KNOPPIX on XenDom0(HostOS).
Hi Ems2, I am the author of the referenced Plan 9 article and I can safely say that 640X480x8 was the default window size that came up.This is fact and not opinion.I think I mentioned that it was easily changed to a higher resolution, either by Rio or by simply typing 800x600x8. I now see that there is a version of emacs available. I referenced an out-of-date posting on the 9fans list (I think). Thanks for the correction. Emacs is a great asset. You will see that I too provided plenty of references to the Plan 9 documentation for people to investigate.
Surely that introduces a single point of failure, though? If one of those single blocks gets corrupted, all that wonderfully redundent data you had on your machine is now all corrupt in exactly the same way.
Of course, I assume the Plan9 developers thought of that too, and there are provisions in the design for this sort of thing.
Ahh, but you are mistaken in your praise of Plan 9, most of us Ed Wood aficionados knows that that isn't his masterpiece, indeed it is trivial in comparison to the behemoth of Glen or Glenda (also known on sensational posters as "I Changed My Sex!"), wherein Wood himself stars as transvestite and Bela Lugosi is an insane rambling doctor.
All jokes aside, Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.
More university support for Plan 9 sounds like an excellent idea to further some of the innovative ideas in the OS. U. Calgary has some support as detailed here: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/lanlp9/
As an alternative to Plan9, you may try also PlanB, a distributed operating system based on Plan9.
That EULA no longer applies, it's legitimately open source now. That was back when Lucent still controlled it very carefully.
It's really easy to make operating systems elegant if you aren't constrained by the terrible task of supporting a large base of (often old) software and hardware (particularly software).
Nothing epitomizes, to me, the Plan 9 attitude like your remark later in the thread about how not having shared libraries is something to celebrate (it's a feature, not a bug!). I'm aware that you didn't just make this up; it's a pretty common thing for Plan 9 implementers and fans to say. Yes, shared libraries are awkward to implement and do some nasty things to the semantics of your run time.
However, out there in the real world, programmers are frequently required to use complicated, feature-rich libraries that do things undreamt-of on Plan 9 (e.g. create a user interface that looks and works even vaguely like the user interface from any other recent system, for example). The fact that Rob Pike's taste for minimalism in user interfaces conveniently scales down the size of the UI library to almost nothing is neither here nor there. acme is a neat idea, but if you wanted to make the argument that shared libraries are bogus, then you need to show that you can deliver something that's as substantial as the functionality of existing libraries through other means (e.g a user-level file server).
The tendency of Plan 9 boosters to write off anything that they don't need to do as 'obviously inelegant and not worth doing' is fine, but it's hard to see how one can draw system design lessons from it.
In some sense, sure, but on the other hand, that is grossly unfair to Ed Wood's beneficial relationship to Lugosi. Consider the following (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi, but which agrees with similar details from some films on the subject, including one with Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, from some years back):
( [*] Plan 9 was a posthumous performance, and note that the death of Lugosi early in filming was precisely the reason that Plan 9 became "the worst film ever made" rather than merely the usual Ed Wood grade B movie.)
Yes, Wood was a hack (albeit a fun one with a cult following to this day), but he did his best to rescue Lugosi when the rest of the world had given up and no longer cared. Give credit where credit is due, rather than simply sneering at the charitable, no matter the flaws you see in the good samaritan. By all accounts, Wood seems to have done the best he could by Lugosi.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary