Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
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Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#2previous "discussion" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767597
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#3I like to imagine that something like containers could provide a rationalised POSIX successor like Plan 9 while still cooperating in the main with a less-clean kernel like Linux. Not certain exactly how that'd work, but it might provide a nice path to building cleaner systems.
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#4Not knowing the details but reflecting on what the summary said and what I do know of Xwindows style systems...
Plan 9 sure puts a lot of trust in the network.
We have learned, since that time, that trusting the network isn't really a good idea. Even a local network might not really be trustworthy.
The division of services that they describe sounds quite wonderful for normal office tasks; but doesn't work well for networks that can shard or for remote users that tunnel in (VPN) and might be disconnected.
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#5Anyone had any experience running the RaspberryPi Plan9? It seems like the ideal way to set up a small cluster using some cheap RaspberryPi Zeros as compute, maybe one for file storage and another as a terminal.
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#6Not knowing the details but reflecting on what the summary said and what I do know of Xwindows style systems... Plan 9 sure puts a lot of trust in the network. We have learned, since that time, that trusting the network isn't really a good idea. Even a local network might not really be trustworthy. The division of services that they describe sounds quite wonderful for normal office tasks; but doesn't work well for ne…
It doesn't put more trust in the network than NBD or NFS does. You don't access your root filesystem over a 3G connection or a flakey VPN on any platform. But, if you mount a remote filesystem that isn't root, disconnecting isn't fatal, you just have to reconnect when the connection is back (aan can handle that).
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#7Anyone had any experience running the RaspberryPi Plan9? It seems like the ideal way to set up a small cluster using some cheap RaspberryPi Zeros as compute, maybe one for file storage and another as a terminal.
Plan9 never really was built for clusters. Rather it was it built to unify the configuration and administration of all of your computers.
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#8Not knowing the details but reflecting on what the summary said and what I do know of Xwindows style systems... Plan 9 sure puts a lot of trust in the network. We have learned, since that time, that trusting the network isn't really a good idea. Even a local network might not really be trustworthy. The division of services that they describe sounds quite wonderful for normal office tasks; but doesn't work well for ne…
It doesn't put more trust in the network than NBD or NFS does. You don't access your root filesystem over a 3G connection or a flakey VPN on any platform. But, if you mount a remote filesystem that isn't root, disconnecting isn't fatal, you just have to reconnect when the connection is back (aan can handle that).
One of the plan9 users put a lot of work into a terminal boot disk that supports rootfs over flakey connections.
Also, last I checked I believe 9front supports mounting root over AAN which supports roaming between networks and flakey connections.
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#9Not knowing the details but reflecting on what the summary said and what I do know of Xwindows style systems... Plan 9 sure puts a lot of trust in the network. We have learned, since that time, that trusting the network isn't really a good idea. Even a local network might not really be trustworthy. The division of services that they describe sounds quite wonderful for normal office tasks; but doesn't work well for ne…
Trust as in uptime or trust as in mitm etc?
All 9p can be over Ssl, authorisation server is not the same machine as the file server / compute server.
This is worse than ssh how?
Re: Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
#10I like to imagine that something like containers could provide a rationalised POSIX successor like Plan 9 while still cooperating in the main with a less-clean kernel like Linux. Not certain exactly how that'd work, but it might provide a nice path to building cleaner systems.
I like to think that Android, iOS with Swift, Windows with .NET, Unikernels are somehow evolution paths for what Inferno/Limbo could have been.
Maybe someone tries something like what you are proposing, using Go in place of Limbo.