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Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

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Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#111

Post by masfuerte »

mike_hearn wrote: post #59

The Plan 9 design wasn't as great as people like to think and it wouldn't have survived in the advertised form if Plan 9 actually had taken off. Actually it was already losing that aesthetic coherence quite early on in its lifetime. Hierarchical nouns, a fixed collection of verbs and a stream of bytes is aesthetically pleasing and can be helpful for developers hacking around, but is too limited and low level a vocabu…

Minor nitpick. Much of the RPC in Windows predates (D)COM. I think it's closer to vanilla DCE RPC.

Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#112

Post by giamma »

codedokode wrote: post #90
xiphias2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

io_uring is a more modern API to file access. Actually I think it would be great if everything was a file and the communication with the kernel was only with io_uring.

> it would be great if everything was a file This is a bad design. Process is not a file because you cannot send signals to a file, or cannot debug a file. Network socket is not a file because you cannot get file's peer address. Shared memory is not a file. And so on.

I am probably looking at it from a too high-level perspective, but the RESTful paradigm was widely adopted in every domain and proved that you can model pretty much any concept as resources, with CRUD primitives and hyperlinks between them.

Wouldn't the same be applicable to files, processes, devices and so on?

Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#113

Post by anthk »

phrenicfraud wrote: post #104
anthk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like the reverse. Coding in 9front's C from the book from Francisco J. Ballestero's felt and still feels like the future today. Golang for example borrows lots of stuff from 1-9c compilers from plan9/9front, Limbo and Plan9 design such as static binaries and cross compiling from anywhere to everywhere.

[flagged]

I use GNU Hyperbola as my main OS. Is not that I am a GNU/Linux hater.

But 9front has good points to borrow from.

Cross GCC (or clang) sucks a lot compared to [1-9]c compilers by a huge margin. Current compilation suites are brain damaged. Don't get me started on cross compiling packages for foreign archs and hunting bugs. Or the compat32 disaster on Debian and derivatives like Trisquel/Ubuntu. Slackware does it fine, tho.

Also, I hope that FS from ori_b gets ported into the future Hyperbola BSD.

Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#114

Post by regentbowerbird »

nine_k wrote: post #39
DiabloD3 wrote: post #2

As of someone who discovered Plan 9 far too late to do anything about it: everything is a poor man's Plan 9 something. Everything. All of it. Plan 9 lived in the goddamned future.

Plan 9 had many improvements over Unix of its times. It opened up too late to conquer the world though. Some good things from it were imported into Solaris and Linux later. Technological progress likes to reinvent itself, looping back to the same idea that did not work last time, and maybe making it a hit finally. Two examples: - Apple Newton, 1992 (a flop) -> Palm Pilot, 1997 (niche success) -> Apple iPhone, 2007 (w…

When you say Inferno led to WASM, is it just conceptual or is there a concrete link?

Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#115

Post by SubjectToChange »

phrenicfraud wrote: post #93
DiabloD3 wrote: post #2

As of someone who discovered Plan 9 far too late to do anything about it: everything is a poor man's Plan 9 something. Everything. All of it. Plan 9 lived in the goddamned future.

And then replies slowly devolve into arguing about irrelevant things that were solved with the existence of Linux because plan9 sucks and Linux is just a kernel which is actually used by people and therefore they actually found ways to solve problems they were most annoyed by. All these "X is poor man's Y" are a cope. Plan9 is poor man's because noone uses it. I'm sure on most people the irony of this statement will…

Plan9 is the perfection of a dead end.

Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#116

Post by stefncb »

arp242 wrote: post #80
stefncb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but for what it's worth using the mouse is much more pleasant than what we're used to ime. It's weird at first, especially with the teleporting thing but it works really well. Also, if you're gonna try it do it either with a proper three-button mouse or with a large-ish and easy to press scroll wheel button. Otherwise it's really frustrating.

One problem I had is that I often just messed up the buttons, especially in the chords, and there's not a whole lot of feedback. I also messed up some things like letting go of the mouse button too soon by accident. Granted, I never spent that long with it, but it's not very mnemonic and requires some amount of motor skills I don't seem to have (e.g. in Vim "dw" is mnemonic for "delete word" and you get more feedback…

I learned the chords very quickly, but everyone works differently. What kind of feedback exactly would you expect from it? I can't immediately think of anything that would make it much better. I guess animations could help, but then they might just be distracting.

I think the main thing people get confused by besides the chording is the teleporting of the cursor, but then you realize it's actually really useful once you get used to it (at least I did).

Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#117

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

giamma wrote: post #112
codedokode wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would be great if everything was a file This is a bad design. Process is not a file because you cannot send signals to a file, or cannot debug a file. Network socket is not a file because you cannot get file's peer address. Shared memory is not a file. And so on.

I am probably looking at it from a too high-level perspective, but the RESTful paradigm was widely adopted in every domain and proved that you can model pretty much any concept as resources, with CRUD primitives and hyperlinks between them. Wouldn't the same be applicable to files, processes, devices and so on?

It is. I don't think people are well familiar with what Plan 9 calls "files". They're objects or resources, which also happen to be files. REST/OOP/Actors/Plan9 are very similar systems.

And like it or not OOP shows that it's possible for one idiom to describe all the things when it's flexible enough.

Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#119

Post by samus »

stuaxo wrote: post #118

I wonder if it would be easier to back-fit to an OS like Serenity where the whole code is in a mono-repo, from kernel up to web browser?

This is the biggest advantage of single-vendor ecosystems like Apple's. The governance aspect is very simplified in this situation, and it becomes possible to ram through such extensive changes. It has to be balanced with backwards compatibility of course.

Re: Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

#120

Post by hutzlibu »

c00lio wrote: post #109
hutzlibu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That's the direction Powershell took, and to some extent was what other OSes were doing at the time of Unix. But Unix has become so ubiquitous and influential that we've forgotten that programs could pass more than ill-specified strings around ... The first step would be to stop putting "Unix philosophy" on a throne " Well yes, but I think it will be hard or rather impossible to convince the unix crowd of anything g…

There are still tons of stringly-typed interfaces in powershell.

I did not say I am a big fan of the powershell or windows in general. But I would still like the few good ideas integrated into linux ..
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