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Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

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Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#31

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

generalizations wrote: post #9
MarkusWandel wrote: post #7

Unix with its "worse is better" simplicity steamrollered vastly more complex operating systems (Multics above all). It even steamrollered its own successor. Plan 9 is brilliant, but Unix already served most people's needs so why change. Mental game: If they had managed to quickly push the whole thing out as what is now called open source, while Unix was still proprietary, how would the world look now?

> how would the world look now Computer system security would be vastly superior, I imagine. Webpages would be mounted file systems with restricted permissions systems, and browser apps would be command line utilities. Both would have benefited from the same security that UNIX systems use these days.

Given that webpages aren't static today, it seems just as likely that in that universe sites would expect you to execute them natively, mounted over 9P. This actually could still work out since Plan 9 did could easily sandbox things, though the security angle would still make me nervous.

Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#32

Post by stormbrew »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #27
ori_b wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You understood the problem backwards. How do you give out actual, real, global root, without taking away the ability to do arbitrary namespaces?

I feel like plan9 nerds (of which I’m one) are missing the point. People are asking “what’s so special about plan9?” and the best response is some esoteric point about a thing people empirically don’t want to do? Who cares? There has to be a better answer than “Wow, I can make my computer that can’t run anything people want to run secure in a hypothetical hierarchical organization structure of permissions that can ea…

I dunno I think the positives are all actually pretty practical. Probably even more so today where heterogeneous computing is so much more common than it was in the 90s.

I would frequently love to have the ability to just mount a bunch of cpus off a beefier machine onto my laptop and take advantage of that to speed up my builds. I can use DISTCC but holy hell is it a lot more complicated to set up.

Or like, mounting a zip file as a directory, without needing a whole enormous systemd or gnome hairball along with fuse or gfs to make it happen as a regular user. Or hell, mount a usb stick even!

These are literally things I wish were easier every day as a software developer. The vaguely plan9-shaped bits that have been added to linux over the years have brought me no closer to them.

Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#33

Post by pcwalton »

generalizations wrote: post #9
MarkusWandel wrote: post #7

Unix with its "worse is better" simplicity steamrollered vastly more complex operating systems (Multics above all). It even steamrollered its own successor. Plan 9 is brilliant, but Unix already served most people's needs so why change. Mental game: If they had managed to quickly push the whole thing out as what is now called open source, while Unix was still proprietary, how would the world look now?

> how would the world look now Computer system security would be vastly superior, I imagine. Webpages would be mounted file systems with restricted permissions systems, and browser apps would be command line utilities. Both would have benefited from the same security that UNIX systems use these days.

We've had sandboxing for a decade on mainstream operating systems with mainstream browsers. I doubt that just adopting Plan 9 would offer any meaningful security improvements over the status quo. It would just be switching a big pile of non-memory-safe C++ for a big pile of non-memory-safe C.

Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#34

Post by pcwalton »

twblalock wrote: post #13

One of the best gifts of Plan 9 was static linking: https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/why_static/index.html Hard drives are cheap, so space is not an argument anymore, for reasonable uses of disk space. And most uses are reasonable! Ah, but you might say, if a shared library is compromised, it's easy to push a fix! But how to you think it got so widely compromised in the first place? Perhaps because it was a widely shared lib…

> Ah, but you might say, if a shared library is compromised, it's easy to push a fix! But how to you think it got so widely compromised in the first place? Perhaps because it was a widely shared library? Sharing is a double-edged sword.

By this logic, every game developer should be writing their own versions of Vulkan for every GPU they want to target. They would have to ship their own set of GPU drivers with every game.

Also, every app that wants to make a TLS connection would have to develop its own cryptography primitives. Hope you enjoy writing ASN.1 parsers (in C, because that's the Plan 9 way).

Sorry, but this "no dependencies" utopia is completely impractical.

Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#36

Post by mixmastamyk »

IshKebab wrote: post #11
MarkusWandel wrote: post #7

Unix with its "worse is better" simplicity steamrollered vastly more complex operating systems (Multics above all). It even steamrollered its own successor. Plan 9 is brilliant, but Unix already served most people's needs so why change. Mental game: If they had managed to quickly push the whole thing out as what is now called open source, while Unix was still proprietary, how would the world look now?

Fewer bugs I imagine. I was reading up on symlinks (trying to find a good reference for how much of a bad idea they are) and found this: https://9p.io/sys/doc/lexnames.html Kind of sad that Plan 9 got rid of them literally decades ago and we're still stuck dealing with their mess.

What mess?

Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#37

Post by pjmlp »

turminal wrote: post #8
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We'll never have any of the things it really promised until we give up on POSIX, tbh. What about POSIX is in conflict with Plan 9? I would have called Plan 9 a subset of POSIX

Pretty much everything is in conflict. POSIX standarized and attempted to unify a dozen different incompatible systems that developed independently on top of the original unix from bell labs. Those systems were developed by building new functionality on top of what unix provided. In order to keep at least some sort of compatibility the old and at times obsolete functionality was kept in the system. Plan 9 on the othe…

Additionally it also took the role of being C's standard library that ISO C did not want to take upon themselves.

Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#38

Post by pjmlp »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #7

Unix with its "worse is better" simplicity steamrollered vastly more complex operating systems (Multics above all). It even steamrollered its own successor. Plan 9 is brilliant, but Unix already served most people's needs so why change. Mental game: If they had managed to quickly push the whole thing out as what is now called open source, while Unix was still proprietary, how would the world look now?

I have another mental game, if UNIX had been sold at the same price as Multics and VMS, how would the world look now?

UNIX only steamrollered other OSes, becasue it was already "open source" during its early decade until AT&T got back the rights to sell, and the BSD lawsuit came to be alongside the prohibition of UNIX V6 annotated source book.

Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#39

Post by pjmlp »

pcwalton wrote: post #33
generalizations wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how would the world look now Computer system security would be vastly superior, I imagine. Webpages would be mounted file systems with restricted permissions systems, and browser apps would be command line utilities. Both would have benefited from the same security that UNIX systems use these days.

We've had sandboxing for a decade on mainstream operating systems with mainstream browsers. I doubt that just adopting Plan 9 would offer any meaningful security improvements over the status quo. It would just be switching a big pile of non-memory-safe C++ for a big pile of non-memory-safe C.

Well, at least we will be using C Machines in a decade, if the trend for hardware memory tagging keeps going on.

Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

#40

Post by pjmlp »

twblalock wrote: post #13

One of the best gifts of Plan 9 was static linking: https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/why_static/index.html Hard drives are cheap, so space is not an argument anymore, for reasonable uses of disk space. And most uses are reasonable! Ah, but you might say, if a shared library is compromised, it's easy to push a fix! But how to you think it got so widely compromised in the first place? Perhaps because it was a widely shared lib…

What?

For decades static linking was the only option on most platforms.

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