Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Security in Plan 9 (2002)

9p.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 74 posts

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#51

Post by seiferteric »

stusmall wrote: post #45
oneplane wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You echo the request into /www/url and cat the response from it

How does it know where to send it? Does it just assume it should use the contents of the Host header and send the request there or is the "url" in your path the destination? Does it support things like SNI?[1] Can you spoof that? Does it expect clients to parse out the raw output of the HTTP response? I have so many questions. From a quick glance this seems a lot harder to work with than curl for both trivial and non…

To be fair you'd probably end up with a tool like curl just for setting all the options and headers, but it would just be a wrapper around sending the request to the url file. Just like there are tools for reading and parsing files in /proc.

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#52

Post by TallGuyShort »

xani_ wrote: post #22
Bayart wrote: post #16

Plan 9 seems to be disproportionately influential for an OS nobody who's not into systems engineering has ever heard about.

It's mostly coz some people that worked on it went to big companies. Go being one example.

I think you're looking at the wrong end of the timeline. The people who built it had already built UNIX and C (and one of them would later write Limbo). Go's initial splash in the "press" was helped massively by that pedigree.

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#53

Post by eyelidlessness »

anderspitman wrote: post #41
enriquto wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and /proc Unfortunately, kids these days seem to be afraid of files. For a hardcore unix fan, curl and wget are useless tools when you can just cat /www/url

> kids these days seem to be afraid of files Sad but true. Android and iOS are the worst offenders I've seen. They're apparently trying to completely get rid of the concept of files altogether, which is really unfortunate for anyone wanting to build cool stuff on those platforms. I understand there can be security benefits but at what cost.

> They're apparently trying to completely get rid of the concept of files altogether

I’ve never followed Android very closely but iOS began with no user-facing notion of files and added one many years and major releases later. Granted they’re not Unix everything-is-a-file, as in you can’t execute them or do all sorts of other everything-is-a-file operations with them. But adding mostly-general file functionality is definitely not trying to get rid of the concept.

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#54

Post by krmboya »

pwinnski wrote: post #44
Bayart wrote: post #16

Plan 9 seems to be disproportionately influential for an OS nobody who's not into systems engineering has ever heard about.

When it was first announced, it wasn't clear it would end up being so esoteric, but I remember that Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Rob Pike were working on it, and maybe Brian Kernighan too? Timing-wise, it was too late for what they ended up doing, but anything all those people worked on is bound to have some interesting ideas. It's been weird watching the rise of iOS loosen the reliance on, or even awareness of,…

Was timing the issue though? Wasn't it released during that period of confusion of the Unix wars before GNU/Linux took over the world?

I had the impression that it was held back by its proprietary license.

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#55

Post by yellowapple »

krmboya wrote: post #54
pwinnski wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it was first announced, it wasn't clear it would end up being so esoteric, but I remember that Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Rob Pike were working on it, and maybe Brian Kernighan too? Timing-wise, it was too late for what they ended up doing, but anything all those people worked on is bound to have some interesting ideas. It's been weird watching the rise of iOS loosen the reliance on, or even awareness of,…

Was timing the issue though? Wasn't it released during that period of confusion of the Unix wars before GNU/Linux took over the world? I had the impression that it was held back by its proprietary license.

> I had the impression that it was held back by its proprietary license.

That was my impression, too. And then it got relicensed to a FOSS license... that was GPL-incompatible. And then it got relicensed again to GPLv2, and then it got relicensed yet again to its current MIT license.

In any case, each of these license changes was too little too late to really improve Plan 9's practicality from a "can I legally use this?" standpoint.

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#56

Post by octetta »

macshome wrote: post #15
tyingq wrote: post #13

The 9p filesystem lives on in a few "modern" places, like within WSL, QEMU, and other places where it's a good bridge between a host OS and container or VM.

Apple added support just in 2019! man mount_9p

Anyone have an example, say of how to use this command to mount the public plan9 repo?

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#57

Post by mburee »

MisterTea wrote: post #20
butterisgood wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually love to see such a paper. Plan 9 threading is more like coroutines, but it is certainly possible to run multi-core/multi-process code. That said, I can't say I've seen anyone try to write anything that scales like nginx on Plan 9. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, I've just not seen anyone talk about it too much. It did run on IBM's Blue Gene for a bit ( https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix07/p…

> I'd actually love to see such a paper. Plan 9 threading is more like coroutines, but it is certainly possible to run multi-core/multi-process code. Rob Pike was on of the main developers behind plan 9 and Go and involved in concurrent programming research focusing on CSP. Multi-processing was a main focus of plan 9's design and it works well as procs are cheap to spawn on plan 9. Procs are also the smallest unit of…

rfork is also just a really elegant system call

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#58

Post by pjmlp »

p_l wrote: post #43
butterisgood wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually love to see such a paper. Plan 9 threading is more like coroutines, but it is certainly possible to run multi-core/multi-process code. That said, I can't say I've seen anyone try to write anything that scales like nginx on Plan 9. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, I've just not seen anyone talk about it too much. It did run on IBM's Blue Gene for a bit ( https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix07/p…

Plan9 libthread is literally goroutines just without the syntax sugar - up till version 1.5, golang shipped significant chunk of Plan9 standard library with itself. It's also where the saner networking interface came from, as Plan9 was to support networking from start, not depend on quick and dirty port of non-Unix stack like BSD Sockets

It got taken care of in Limbo and Inferno, Plan 9's sucessor that people keep forgeting about and heavily influenced Go.

https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#59

Post by pjmlp »

MisterTea wrote: post #20
butterisgood wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually love to see such a paper. Plan 9 threading is more like coroutines, but it is certainly possible to run multi-core/multi-process code. That said, I can't say I've seen anyone try to write anything that scales like nginx on Plan 9. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, I've just not seen anyone talk about it too much. It did run on IBM's Blue Gene for a bit ( https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix07/p…

> I'd actually love to see such a paper. Plan 9 threading is more like coroutines, but it is certainly possible to run multi-core/multi-process code. Rob Pike was on of the main developers behind plan 9 and Go and involved in concurrent programming research focusing on CSP. Multi-processing was a main focus of plan 9's design and it works well as procs are cheap to spawn on plan 9. Procs are also the smallest unit of…

And also Limbo and Inferno, Plan 9's sucessor that people keep forgeting about and heavily influenced Go.

https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#60

Post by Bayart »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #52
xani_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly coz some people that worked on it went to big companies. Go being one example.

I think you're looking at the wrong end of the timeline. The people who built it had already built UNIX and C (and one of them would later write Limbo). Go's initial splash in the "press" was helped massively by that pedigree.

I do have distinct memories of Go's initial hype being « Ken Thompson and Rob Pike did this ».
Post reply on HN