Slashdot Mirror
Plan 9 Running on Blue Gene
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."
It will be running "Duke Nukem Forever".
Can it run Vista?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
"Plan 9?
Ah, yes. Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary gland of the recently dead."
That's pretty cool to think about since I didn't know if Plan 9 is still used or not beyond research environments. Or even developed for. Also I was beginning to think Slashdot was dying since I hardly come here anymore, but with news like this I feel mistaken.. Pretty cool!
Am I the only one that was wondering why Plan 9 Pulishing (http://www.plan9.org/) would need to be run on Blue Gene?
Is this a going concern? Do lots of people use this?
What happened to Plans 1-8? And could you make a module that corrupts the output, and call it Plan B? I think it may be a little too early to grasp exactly what the story is here. Where's my caffeine?
Forget Vista, can it cook toast? Without burning it?
This sig left intentionally blank.
i just knew they use them to watch bad movies. or even better.. porn with a million Teraflops???
...about how I am so l33t and my linux runs on a 386 with 4 meg o RAM? Isn't this the extreme opposite of those posts, using a stupid fast computer to run a tight little OS (probably thinks it's a screensaver)? Well somebody's compensating for something in the hallowed hallways of IBM...
The real questions of any relevance are:
1. Can it run Linux?
2. Is there going to be a Beowulf cluster?
3. Is this actually a machine you can run Vista on?
I'm not buying a Blue Gene until they port AmigaOS to it, like God intended.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well , cutting edge for 1990. If thats the best it can do on a supercomputer it doesn't bode well for your average PC!
I'm sure Plan 9 is an interesting intellectual exercise for the people involved, but other than that , what exactly is its point? The way some people refer to it you'd think it was the 2nd Coming in the world of operating systems. Well if thats the case its the longest coming in history. 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.
Plan 9 looks to me like the perennial contender for something which is never to be released; much like the HURD (although I think the HURD is more like a search in the wrong direction altogether; I mean, if you're going to do it all afresh - why use UNIX ?). I imagine a bunch of Wozniaks tinkering about all day without any impatient Jobses looking over their shoulder scheming to make a buck. Then I read their website again, and I knew for sure they must be out of their minds at bit: THEY BROUGHT ALONG 'ED' !!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Stupid! Stupid!
When you've got solamanite, you've got nothing!
(Yeah, its one of my fave movies)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Sorry but it's not really clear what it all implies. Could someone explain?
You just got troll'd!
I can't believe people in slashdot is so absolutely reatard. Of course, plan9 people don't read slashdot any more, so you won't have what you deserve (I would like to see what uriel would tell you...), but if you read a little, you will see that plan9 is one of the pieces of software which sucks less. Its source code is ART, what you can do with it is awesome, and it would be the standard if people wasn't so stupid (probably due to all those lights and colors in your screens...)
Long live to glenda!!!!
The graphical programs displayed are: the mail announcer faces(1), the system statistics watcher stats(8), the text editor acme(1), the sky catalog scat(1), the image viewer
I'm not sure I'm ready to check out any "graphical" items called scat.
That is, if you look at the source. Man, for such a simple page they sure use an enormous amount of tage. If this is what the future looks like, I want the past back !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
From the plan9 page: "... it does not require source code to be distributed with derived works; it is non-viral."
Do people really need to say "non-viral"? Does this add information, or is it an attack on the GPL?
licences are not alive.
Or is the copyright on Microsoft code "viral" as well? Derivations are restricted the same as the original.
Considering some of the low power hardware that NetBSD has been ported to, I am sure that a top of the line IBM super computer should have no trouble handling it :)
Don't judge a book by its cover. The current generation of flashy-looking OS's are excellent for computers with a small number of CPU cores and uniform memory, but they are really poor for machines with many cores and core-local memory. Plan 9 is designed to work as a distributed OS, which is perfect for Blue Gene, and it will probably become more and more relevant to home computing as we move towards PCs with thousands of CPU cores, because we'll need a decent distributed OS to make use of them. The mid-80s "FVWM" look is just because it is a research OS and the researchers have better things to do than port KDE.
I was wondering if Plan 9 integrates all peripherals through the file system, wouldn't it be easier to do system calls in pure functional languages, without the need for side effects? I guess it would be possible to program a complete program of any sort in a purely functional language such as Haskell. Does anyone know something about this? My interest is purely academic though, as i don't have any plans for plan 9.
...turn it into a Sinclair ZX81 to prove that it can be done?
What's next? ReactOS on a Cray?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time. Ed, man!
/bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
!man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed { - } { -x } { name }
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which:
1. Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG;
2. reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and
3. RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem$ ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
?
Okay, with a name like that I definitely clicked on the link... and I feel *so* cheated.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Uh, never mind...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
So I suppose it will replace every UNIX system by 2038?
Is where IBM raises the dead in an attempt to takeover Earth without ever having to leave the mother ship.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
just like BSD.
Plan 9 was designed at Bell Labs as the successor to Unix. Its primary characteristic is that EVERYTHING is managed as a file, down to devices. So if you have a CD in your drive, and you only wanted the data track of the CD mounted, you'd delete the subdirectory containing the audio track and it'd be unmounted. It never really caught on outside of research environments.
What you say is not true.
/proc filesystem and the like. In practice, I think having resources controllable as files is useful only to the entent that nearly every programing language has fwrite() and fread() capability in some way, even if just by shell redirection. There is actually no point in being able to open up a file editor, save to /dev/wifi and have those bits go out over the antennea.
I worked for a time with some people who were deep 9 fans. They wanted to build a network of wireless access points running Plan9, and a big "computing cloud" or "resource cloud". They thought you could make a system where you logged in at any place, and all your windows popped up there with your desktop as you left it halfway accross town; your processes would supposedly migrate from CPU to CPU according to how best to allocate resources; all the files would be spread accross everyone's disks so no one disaster could loose anything, but they would migrate close to you for speed as you used them; etc etc. Basically every cool sounding impractical idea you ever heard of from Freenet to sci-fi cypercrap they said you could do with Plan9.
I got on the 9fans list and read a lot of the web site and then got to work. I found out that they had this concept of a cpuserver versus a disk server versus authentication server, so I had to buy two machines; running everything on one machine was possible but somehow more complecated (I think that is what most people do now, and what the Xen image does, though). So I bought 2 machines and built a third from cast off parts and started installing. I took careful notes of everything, when stuff didn't work I would wipe the disk and start over taking notes again.
I figured out the following things:
1) There is no migration of processes from one CPU server to another. When confronted, the hypesters said "well I never said we wouldn't have to write code"
2) The disk server isn't anything more than any networked filesystem with authentication. They kept making a big deal about the great ideas in their filesystem, and talking a lot about some crap that they had written back when they had a big jukebox of CDRs that made them act like a big mutable filesystem and tracked changes. In the end, it is all just files and directories and passwords, there is nothing new; no files migrate to the machine with the faster disk if they are used often or anything like that. In fact it has bugs and "documentation bugs", but they have so few people using it and helping each other on 9fans that often bugs never get established as being real bugs with the people who should fix them.
3) The user interface is horrible. I think it was written by some guys at Bell Labs who never had a graphical computer in their lives, saw windows 3.1 taking over the world, so read some theoretical papers from SIGRAPH or something and cobbled something together. I have a strong suspicion that Rob Pike and those other fellows can't touch type, and operate a computer by hunting and pecking with the left hand while the right hand operates the mouse. That ACME editor and the interface start to make sense if you immagine a Rip Van Winkle stuck in Bell Labs since 1960 peering out at the world briefly about 1984, and then scuttling back inside and madly hacking some crap for a decade, and then producing it in 1994. If you read the mailing list, it becomes plain that most of these guys use Windows and connect to their Plan9 fetish boxes using a remote desktop tool. This is the only way they can browse the web. All except for a few don't even read their email on Plan9, which supposedly has a great tool for that, they use outlook -- just check the headers on the mailing list.
4) that scripting language rio is just another sh
5) they make a big deal about an "everything is a file" paradigm, parts of which were copied into unix as the
and lot more of the same.
As I worked through these problems and posted on 9fans, I slowly started
There were about 30 people attending the International Plan9 Symposium in Madrid last year (of which I was one). So how does that compare with *BSD?
Oh my god! They killed Bell Labs!
-- David
Yes, and this is the only interesting story out of the 10% that haven't been on digg first.
I doubt Plan9 is digg material. (I take that back - 2 diggs..)
They'd like Glenda well enough, but who doesn't?
RIO isn't a GUI. It's a window manager. Have a poke around rio.c sometime and the first thing you'll notice is how small and easy to follow it is. Why, I myself have already made great strides in turning rio into something 'nicer'. I am by no means a hardcore coder but I found it easy enough to modify rio to have borderless windows and customizable colors and elements paving the way for running a different GUI -ontop- of RIO. Did someone say fluxbox? Watch this space, it will happen sooner rather than later...
But again, as already mentioned, anyone who complains about the GUI on a COMPUTE SERVER designed to run processes and hand back results has totally missed the point, like that analogy mentioned earlier with the formula one car and the stereo.
It's one of the best distributed research OSs there is. We'll have to see, now, if it is as useful a research tool as hoped with so many processors.
It's good to see that you guys "who hardly ever come here any more" happened to be here on the same day as this announcement.
like Ab Initio's Co>Operating System. It uses distributed file systems as well for distributed Extraction Transaction & Loading of data warehouse type applications. But it's as expensive as hell, like $5-10k per processor licensing fee. Be interesting if something like that was built on top of this.
http://blog.slaingod.com
so full of Plan 9 fanboys ?! That article just proves Plan 9 still isn't ready for the desktop.
L/unix and family and Windows et all have similar perspective; one computer/cpu per user possibly connecting to a network. SMP is an after thought and hack, the programming has to be rethought.
Plan 9 alters the perspective of the computer and how it interacts over a network. I understand it to work that every Plan9 site acts as though all parts of the network are available to each user. The basic idea is that the more resources on the network the better your computing experience. Also Plan9 takes Unix's 'everything is a file' even more literally. Including the window manager. kinda freaky to use, never got used to it so have given up for now. Maybe version 5 or 6 may be more 36pack joe friendly.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
in-or-out? I stick my penis out my zipper-or-buttonfly? or I stick my penis in my buttonfly-or-zipper? I guess you had to be there.
It is getting better at chess, it takes more concentration each time, but still I win.
Gnu's Not Unix Plan9 Or Open Source now featuring the herd of cats kernel.
Laugh damn it, it's a joke.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?