71–80 of 102 posts
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Yeah zones especially, I agree.
Why not Jails? It was pretty much the first to provide this in Unix land. I guess the advantage of Docker / containers was / is the nice TUI for developers as well as Hub. We never had a ‘jailshub’ in FreeBSD.
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.…
A manifestation of Cat-V.org Derangement Syndrome I wager.
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.
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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.
So it seems to work. But I'm no expert and I've never done it, so I might well be missing something.
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…
Among other classes I took with Axel, he definitely spent at least 20% of the time overall talking about Inferno. I never had my code in front of Dennis Ritchie, but I will throw in from my perspective, the most valuable part of a CS education from RIT was hearing that my code was terrible, just enough times to make me want to make it better later on, in my professional career when it has started to matter.
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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.
People always defend Java as if these penalties don’t exist somehow.
Also according to my (admittedly rather basic) tests the DIS VM performs far better than JVM.
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Transparently gluing boxes together over a low bandwidth fabric died as an active research area right around the time Plan9 was seeing its first development. By the late 80s shared bus SMP had demonstrated its practicality and quickly became the predominant architecture. Today we don't spawn processes on remote CPUs because the whole act of scheduling on multiple CPUs is entirely transparent to us, that's a competing…
Although no downvote, there continued to be plenty of research and dollars in grid computing that did stuff like that on top of "distributed, shared memory" that did stuff like that. Then, all the research in HPC clusters that tried to create a "Single, System Image" running stuff across machines like it was one machine. The MOSIX quote doesn't change the fact that various researchers kept attempting this and making…
Kerrighed was an SSI system that actually was actually commercialized, apparently unsuccessfully. Current (I think) proprietary software systems in that sort of space are ScaleMP and Bproc (from Penguin Computing?). Dolphin had an SCI-based hardware solution for gluing together distributed systems, at least until recently. The Plan 9-ish Xcpu service was described as building on work with Bproc, but explicitly wasn't SSI.
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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.
Why wouldn't a a socket exported over NFS just work seamlessly?
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Although no downvote, there continued to be plenty of research and dollars in grid computing that did stuff like that on top of "distributed, shared memory" that did stuff like that. Then, all the research in HPC clusters that tried to create a "Single, System Image" running stuff across machines like it was one machine. The MOSIX quote doesn't change the fact that various researchers kept attempting this and making…
I think the keyword here is transparency -- later designs (even stuff like MPI) explicitly expose the topology of the available hardware. SMP is the closest thing we've ever got to true transparency, and then only for 80% of cases, and for those only because the compute nodes have very similar locality and e.g. memory bandwidth Even SMP requires careful control if you want to get anything close to the actual performa…
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.…
Although I'm not sure how that "mounting" of cpus would avoid people hogging resources. I use a HPC system where users submit jobs and there's a whole complicated queuing system going on to make sure that greedy users don't monopolize the system.