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Inferno Operating System

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Re: Inferno Operating System

#51

Post by ori_b »

henesy wrote: post #32
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.…

Linux containers feel like a very weak imitation of what they could be under an environment like Plan9 imo. Linux lacks a lot of core abstraction properties that would make containers elegant to implement under something like the Plan9 model, at least. Cool project inspired partially by Linux containers: https://doc.9gridchan.org/guides/spawngrid

> Linux lacks a lot of core abstraction properties

No, it's worse than that: It has too many of them, leading to a mess of special cases that you have to deal with. What happens when you have a socket in your file system, and you export it over NFS?

Lacking abstraction properties is fixable -- you can add them. But removing them, especially if they're widely used, is incredibly hard.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#52

Post by ori_b »

yingw787 wrote: post #33

Would Plan9 fit in with applications like robotics? I feel like such an operating system would do well with the need to interoperate between a bunch of different types of sensors and hardware, and the need for sensor fusion. I’m not sure if Linux and device drivers are the right foundation for that kind of stuff.

Yes, until someone asks "Can I use $POPULAR_MEGAFRAMEWORK".

Re: Inferno Operating System

#53

Post by ptrott2017 »

spc476 wrote: post #45
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.…

QNX can do that as well. You can, from the command line, run a program on computer A referencing a file from computer B and pipe the output to a program on computer C and send that output to a file on computer D.

I never knew that about QNX - Is it possible to also monitor the connected processes across all machines?

Re: Inferno Operating System

#54

Post by jadbox »

adam_gyroscope wrote: post #42

Back when I was in university we had a small course on Limbo/Inferno because of a connection my university (RIT) had to bell labs. I took the course in... 1998? and wrote a version of Tetris for limbo. The code was awful, but did find a bug in the Tk implementation. This lead me to my proudest/most embarrassing programming moment - apparently, my code ended up in front of Dennis Ritchie, who thought the code was terr…

That's a great story! We have written all written embarrassing code at some point in our careers. xD

Re: Inferno Operating System

#55

Post by henesy »

soraminazuki wrote: post #49
sprash wrote: post #38

This OS doesn't require an MMU or protected memory. I wonder if a processor architecture that lacks those features could yield much higher performance due to less complexity, reduced memory latency or less cache miss penalty. Will it be enough to mitigate the perormance penalty of runing code in the Dis VM?

You'd have to compensate for the lack of memory protection by running all unprivileged code in a VM, which would very likely introduce its own class of complexities and performance penalties.

Inferno instances are really meant to be compartments for individual programs more than a desktop OS in and of itself.

Dis VM instances are super light… you wouldn't really be needing to worry much about running a large number of them.

Point aside in many cases you can sandbox applications in crafted namespaces using spawn and flags like NODEVS.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#56

Post by riffraff »

adam_gyroscope wrote: post #42

Back when I was in university we had a small course on Limbo/Inferno because of a connection my university (RIT) had to bell labs. I took the course in... 1998? and wrote a version of Tetris for limbo. The code was awful, but did find a bug in the Tk implementation. This lead me to my proudest/most embarrassing programming moment - apparently, my code ended up in front of Dennis Ritchie, who thought the code was terr…

I find it impressive you still have code you wrote for a university class in '98!

Re: Inferno Operating System

#57

Post by spc476 »

ptrott2017 wrote: post #53
spc476 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QNX can do that as well. You can, from the command line, run a program on computer A referencing a file from computer B and pipe the output to a program on computer C and send that output to a file on computer D.

I never knew that about QNX - Is it possible to also monitor the connected processes across all machines?

I suspect you can, although I it's been years since I last used QNX.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#58

Post by henesy »

henesy wrote: post #22

Nice to see Inferno posted! Some Inferno related stuff: - Limbo by Example: https://github.com/henesy/limbobyexample - The Inferno Shell: http://debu.gs/entries/inferno-part-1-shell - Try Inferno in the browser: http://tryinferno.rekka.io/ - Cat-v Inferno resources: http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno - Experiments in Inferno/Limbo: https://github.com/caerwynj/inferno-lab/ - Inferno Programming with Limbo: https://web.archi…

It's a really early draft, but here's the base for an awesome-inferno repository: https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno

Re: Inferno Operating System

#59

Post by michaelmrose »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #34
0815test wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

CRIU should allow you to migrate a running process from one system to another, particularly in combination with a container (Docker or LXC/D).

Doesn't this work on about nothing in practice? Like nothing that has an open file, no gui apps etc.

Re: Inferno Operating System

#60

Post by fit2rule »

adam_gyroscope wrote: post #42

Back when I was in university we had a small course on Limbo/Inferno because of a connection my university (RIT) had to bell labs. I took the course in... 1998? and wrote a version of Tetris for limbo. The code was awful, but did find a bug in the Tk implementation. This lead me to my proudest/most embarrassing programming moment - apparently, my code ended up in front of Dennis Ritchie, who thought the code was terr…

Is that your Tetris in the screenshot?
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