[geeks] Plan9 - anyone familiar with this?

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

Hi,

Well it is certainly an interesting re-thinking of some of the core UNIX concepts.  

Since the Plan9 developers removed a lot of "cruft" they were able to make something very lean. 

The Rio windowing system is very basic, however it uses about 6000 lines of code to implement.  It feels like an early X11 window manager, like TWM or something similar.

You have four kinds of "servers"   a CPU server (serves CPU capacity i.e. you login to it and run programs); an authentication server (which you can boot diskless over the LAN); a file server (which serves files after checking with the auth server) and the terminal server, which can be booted diskless and just runs a display, keyboard, mouse.  You can combine these, but the nice thing is that once set up - you're done and don't need to maintain accounts, no matter how many CPU servers or fileservers you have; you point everything to the auth server and that is it.

There are some kind of facilities to easily run e.g. big compiles on multiple CPU servers easily - your logged-in account means that all processes you run will see the files, if you are compiling.  

There is a lot more, I am just getting into it.

URLs:  cat-v.org ; 9front.org ; 9p.io and probably more.  C compiler and Go language compiler are both available natively; there is a Unix-compat layer called APE but so far I haven't looked into it much, since I am running Linux with 9front under QEMU.   The GUI client for Unix, Windows, Mac is called drawterm - you can login sort of like using an X11 terminal.

Cheers,

Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel Peterson" <lionel4287 at gmail.com>
To: "The Geeks List" <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2022 5:29:21 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
Subject: Re: [geeks] Plan9 - anyone familiar with this?

No, but I remember reading a lot about it, but never put it on anything. I'd be interested in your notes/experience with it, please share as you make progress.

(At the moment I'm focusing on my PiDP-8 and PiDP-70 from Oskar V, I'm trying to learn 50 year-old tech for some reason (regrets that I never got to use them 'back in the day', I guess. since my school was all about TRS-80 Model 1 and Apple IIe, the only thing I did was dink around on the surface of a DEC Pro 350 running a version of RSX-1M Plus under a 'shell' called POS (Professional Operating System, I'll point out!)

Ken

> On Sep 20, 2022, at 14:15, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi all
> 
> I am playing around with 9Front.org's implementation of Plan9 (has better x86 drivers, supposedly) in a VM.
> 
> Anyone else played around with this OS?  
> 
> --Patrick
> 
> _______________________________________________
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