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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."
Were Plans 1-8 "not entirely successful?"
"You see! You see! Your stupid minds! STUPID! STUPID!"
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Before y'all go pulling down the ISO to try it out, the mirrors are listed at http://netlib.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mirrors/ind ex.html .
I've never used it, but Plan 9 offers a radically different archival storage system called Venti.
Basically it never deletes old blocks of data from the server. Blocks are write-once, identified by a really large hash (collisions are so improbable that the possibility can be totally ignored). This allows you to copy lots of redundant data to the server (such as periodic backups) without worrying about the storage space. If the blocks were ever copied there before and they have not changed, they won't take up any space!
The review is not so great in terms of accuracy i.e. there is no emacs (check out acme, sam, ed, and smacme instead) and the 640x480 resolution is nonsense. 9fans certainly isn't so grateful about this review.
Check out the Plan 9 documentation if you are interested in understanding Plan 9.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
"Plan 9 from Bell Labs" is the proper name of the OS.
/n/ftp
Plan 9 is now community driven, albiet from a small community, mostly the same people that have been there all along.
It has USB sound support and AC97 support is a new one on me.
I use it still because the user environment is the best one I have encountered for text editing and interecting with the shell. Most users use VNC to get to their X11/Windows desktops where their web browser lives.
Building a web browser from scratch is one of those never ending tasks that frankly, just isn't worth your while. That said there is Mothra - no tables, no css, no frames etc. that Tom Duff (yes that Tom Duff) wrote many moons ago and one of the community is beavering away at his project Abaco and has moderate success.
One of the main tenets to Plan 9 is "everything is a file" and the system is built around the notion of a distributed name space in the shape of a directory tree rather than being a reflection of the disk contents. The canonical example of this is ftps where the remote ftp site is presented as a directory tree at
Name spaces are process independent so you can build them per process which feels a bit like chrooting.
Exporting a name space is part of the deal, this presents many gifts that were not deliberately shoe-horned in such as remote step debugging across architectures, sending sound to a remote soundcard, importing a remote machine's network stack instead of using a gateway (including non-plan9 machines via ssh), importing remote filesystems (including non plan 9 machines). All this is facilitated by the 9p protocol.
As a micro/macro kernel hybrid all this is achieved in just 37 syscalls which is a source of amusement and a feeling of superiority when compared to Linux' 300+ (so many they are not even enumerated any more).
Linux is derided in the mailing list ("For amateurs, by amateurs") as well as the failings of the other braindead OSes we have to deal with ("If only they did it like us").
Linus has stopped by in 9fans to whine on about stuff and was seen off, Theo wanted our compilers when he didn't want the license (as imposed by Lucent lawyers) but since they have been dual licensed we've not seen him around.
Inferno isn't plan 9, it's another product built on similar principles that was sold off by Lucent.
Lucent's management of Plan 9 in hindsight could have prevented adoption when it was crucial - it was $300 per copy prior to v. 3 and once a free download had a "copies of all modifications must be sent to Lucent" clause and other annoying restrictions in it. These have been lifted now but they boat could already have sailed.
The notion of distributed computing has gained ground in recent times and Plan 9 could have been at the forefront with distributed computing being built in from the start.
All that said, Plan 9 was never intended as anything more than an experiment and some ideas have slowly crept into other products (or possibly independently invented) - notably Windows XP presenting their stuff as files/folders, ftpfs in Linux, single sign-on.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Considering that the "Your stupid minds! STUPID! STUPID!" line is a quote from the movie, I suspect the OP knew that.
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.
>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.
/dev
Sorry, this is where you're wrong.
Make the socket interface a filesystem, and all you do is mount a fileserver over that, to create
a socks proxy/http proxy/whatever. All apps get the capability of
doing networking over a proxy, transparently - no need for using libs or
prelinking hacks that usually don't work.
Have the ability to easily create fileservers in userspace, and create an mail
filesystem that can handle imap/pop/local mboxes etc. Mail clients doesn't need
to reimplement your favorite mail protocol in yet another broken and incompatible
way, or adhere to 4 different libraries with 4 different concepts. Just read/write files and
have the one fileserver do the job.
Sharing files AND resources becomes easy too. Want to play sound on another computer ? import hostname:/dev/audio
Having all resources being files, you get a standard way of access control (add ACLs if you really need to), couple it with private
namespaces, and you don't need the umpten hacks like freebsd jails, chroots, selinux, systrace, etc. Just use chmod/chown and set up a filesystem namespace only containing the resources (resources in this case is anything you request from the OS - networking interface, audio device, screen display, authentication privileges, or most other of the 400 syscalls or ioctls you might want to restrict access to in a read/change on traditional unixes.