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Plan 9 Running on Blue Gene

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the buttonfly-or-zipper dept.

gholmer writes "Eric Van Hensbergen reports that Plan 9 has been successfully booted on IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. A live demo will be attempted during a poster session at this year's Usenix. There is also the obligatory Space Glenda picture."

6 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pretty cool by b1ufox · · Score: 3, Informative
    Incidentally perhaps you are misunderstanding Plan9. It is not the kind of OS *we* are used to. That said it includes L/unix and family and Windows et all. It serves a different purpose of OS all together, in other terms its a distributed Operating system which incidentally is not designed purposefully to run on your standalone machine.

    Feel like running it, you are welcome to the world of wmii, acme and acid. In short Firefox or for that matter any other application comes lower in hierarchy, a lot of things need to be done to make it first Posix complaint, which i guess they are not planing to so soon.

    As far as the people who think it is only for research yes it is and this is what Plan9 on Blue Gene is aimed at. As a research project.

    My 2 cents :-)

    --
    -- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
  2. Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... by mls · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Has it broken any new ground with any new operating paradigms? (Thats a genuine question , I don't know). I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD."

    Well, yes. Read the overview

    Slowly, ideas from Plan 9 are being adopted by other systems. Plan 9 was the first operating system with complete support for the UTF-8 Unicode character set encoding. The dump file system has been mimicked in Athena's OldFiles directories or Network Appliance's .snapshot directories. The flexible rfork(2) system call, the basis of lightweight threads, was adopted as is by the various BSD derivatives and reincarnated on Linux as clone(2). The simple file protocol 9P has been implemented on early versions of FreeBSD and current versions of Linux.
    --
    -mls
  3. Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... by Dopeskills · · Score: 3, Informative

    The whole purpose of the project is to research new ideas which make their way into production operating systems. "Slowly, ideas from Plan 9 are being adopted by other systems. Plan 9 was the first operating system with complete support for the UTF-8 Unicode character set encoding. The dump file system has been mimicked in Athena's OldFiles directories or Network Appliance's .snapshot directories. The flexible rfork(2) system call, the basis of lightweight threads, was adopted as is by the various BSD derivatives and reincarnated on Linux as clone(2). The simple file protocol 9P has been implemented on early versions of FreeBSD and current versions of Linux."

  4. Plan 9 - a radical OS by andrewzx1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Plan 9 is a radically distributed OS. It was written from conception as a distributed kernel, and all aspects of the OS are distributed in ways that Linux/Unix/Windows are not. It may be older, but it embraces many distributed paradigms that few OS's in production can handle. Because it is so distributed, the many common utils are simply not compatible with the kernel without a ground-up rewrite. Emacs Emacs, X, KDE, Gnome are not ported and probably won't be. Here's a naive review: http://www.osnews.com/story.php/15235/Investigatin g-the-Plan-9-Operating-System

  5. Re:Pretty cool by DrSkwid · · Score: 4, Informative

    Inferno is based around the DIS virtual machine and much of the system code is written in Limbo which is compiled to DIS bytecode.

    Plan9 is C based and can't run DIS natively.

    Plan9 and Inferno now use a unified 9P protocol - 9p2000 (they used to use 9p and Styx respectively).

    Lucent sold Inferno to Vita Nuova holdings http://www.vitanuova.com/ and they now develop Inferno and exploit it commercially.

    Inferno and Plan9 are used in Lucent products. Plan9 with RT extensions is used in Lucent mobile phone masts to manage calls. Sape Mullender presented a paper at the IWP last year about it. http://plan9.escet.urjc.es/iwp9/cready/realtime.pd f

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  6. Re:Pretty cool by DrSkwid · · Score: 4, Informative

    APE -- The ANSI/POSIX Environment
    http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/ape.html

    Plan9 has the Abaco web browser, it's still in development but you can use Gmail with it apparently.

    http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/fgb/aba co.pdf

    So put your 2c back in your pocket.

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter