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Inferno Operating System

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Re: Inferno Operating System

#11

Post by m_sahaf »

There are times when I wish Plan9 and/or Inferno took off and won some respectable market share. Having a laptop, smartphone, tablet, Synology storage at home, servers on DO, and remnant external HDD from prior era becomes frustrating because my files end up being everywhere and nowhere. There were times when I want to be able to start working on some code on my laptop, pause, then continue work on my tablet later on. At those moments it would have been wonderful if I had Plan9's ability to mount remote filesystems, sync across the network, and have consistent view however I access the data. Yes, SSHFS is available, and the same protocol from Plan9 is available in Linux nowadays, but setting them up isn't as simple as it was in Plan9 and being native to the OS.

That, in addition to the fixes it had (truly everything is a file) and the innovative features delivered (e.g. namespaces).

Can we revive them? Inferno's development seems to have slowed down to a halt.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#13

Post by rhabarba »

m_sahaf wrote: post #11

There are times when I wish Plan9 and/or Inferno took off and won some respectable market share. Having a laptop, smartphone, tablet, Synology storage at home, servers on DO, and remnant external HDD from prior era becomes frustrating because my files end up being everywhere and nowhere. There were times when I want to be able to start working on some code on my laptop, pause, then continue work on my tablet later on…

Plan 9 (and some of its distributions, namely 9front and 9pi, the latter being Plan 9 for the Raspberry Pi) are still developed. No revival needed. You'll just have to download, install and use them. And they come with VNC, if you absolutely need incompatible software like a sane web browser.

edit: That said, I happily use some of Plan9port every day. There never was a better Acme editor (or, rather, Acme2k) on any other operating system. Amazing concept!

Re: Inferno Operating System

#14

Post by rhabarba »

panpanna wrote: post #4

In reality, this was an attempt to turn Plan 9 into a commercial product. Plan 9 despite it's crazy UI (the shell and editor have been ported to Linux so some people must have liked it) brought a lot of new ideas which eventually found their way into other projects such as Linux containers and Go (for obvious reasons). One really good idea that died with Plan 9 was transparent distribution of CPUs across the network.…

Except that Plan 9 has not died.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#16

Post by 0815test »

m_sahaf wrote: post #11

There are times when I wish Plan9 and/or Inferno took off and won some respectable market share. Having a laptop, smartphone, tablet, Synology storage at home, servers on DO, and remnant external HDD from prior era becomes frustrating because my files end up being everywhere and nowhere. There were times when I want to be able to start working on some code on my laptop, pause, then continue work on my tablet later on…

> There were times when I want to be able to start working on some code on my laptop, pause, then continue work on my tablet later on

In order to do these things 'cleanly' (with a truly unified view of the entire "system"), you need some sort of process migration infrastructure that even Plan9 and Inferno don't really give you, AFAICT. Projects like OpenMosix and OpenSSI attempted to provide this, but I'm not sure to what extent they were successful, given that they've all been abandoned and bitrotted. Today, one might try to do the same sort of thing while also taking advantage of the new kernel-based namespacing that Linux provides, which might make some things somewhat easier.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#17

Post by rhabarba »

fghtr wrote: post #2

Namespaces: a program's view of the network is a single, coherent namespace that appears as a hierarchical file system but may represent physically separated (locally or remotely) resources Standard communication protocol: a standard protocol, called Styx, is used to access all resources, both local and remote This looks similar to Qubes Air roadmap: https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2018/01/22/qubes-air/

Except that you cannot run a Qubes CPU server without a giant overhead.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#18

Post by ACE_Recliner »

Just a note for anyone who is looking to try this out: there are currently some fairly hard baked and thorny 32 bit dependencies in the Dis VM, so your system will need to be multilib to run it. There's currently a 64 bit porting effort going on in the form of Purgatorio, but that's still some time away from being complete (I recommend using it anyway because it's the most up to date version of the Inferno tree).

Re: Inferno Operating System

#19

Post by m_sahaf »

0815test wrote: post #16
m_sahaf wrote: post #11

There are times when I wish Plan9 and/or Inferno took off and won some respectable market share. Having a laptop, smartphone, tablet, Synology storage at home, servers on DO, and remnant external HDD from prior era becomes frustrating because my files end up being everywhere and nowhere. There were times when I want to be able to start working on some code on my laptop, pause, then continue work on my tablet later on…

> There were times when I want to be able to start working on some code on my laptop, pause, then continue work on my tablet later on In order to do these things 'cleanly' (with a truly unified view of the entire "system"), you need some sort of process migration infrastructure that even Plan9 and Inferno don't really give you, AFAICT. Projects like OpenMosix and OpenSSI attempted to provide this, but I'm not sure to…

Whoa, not going that far. No processes are moving from one computer to another, just proper file syncing and maybe some centralized authentication.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#20

Post by mveety »

rhabarba wrote: post #14
panpanna wrote: post #4

In reality, this was an attempt to turn Plan 9 into a commercial product. Plan 9 despite it's crazy UI (the shell and editor have been ported to Linux so some people must have liked it) brought a lot of new ideas which eventually found their way into other projects such as Linux containers and Go (for obvious reasons). One really good idea that died with Plan 9 was transparent distribution of CPUs across the network.…

Except that Plan 9 has not died.

Yeah, we're still here.
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