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)
#2The most frustrating thing to ever happen to the concepts in plan9 is the funhouse mirror distortions of them that have landed in the linux world. They look just enough like plan9 that people think they represent those ideas, and so they have no idea how powerful those ideas can actually be and don't even know that they don't know it.
We'll never have any of the things it really promised until we give up on POSIX, tbh.
Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)
#3The most frustrating thing to ever happen to the concepts in plan9 is the funhouse mirror distortions of them that have landed in the linux world. They look just enough like plan9 that people think they represent those ideas, and so they have no idea how powerful those ideas can actually be and don't even know that they don't know it. We'll never have any of the things it really promised until we give up on POSIX, tb…
> 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
Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)
#4The most frustrating thing to ever happen to the concepts in plan9 is the funhouse mirror distortions of them that have landed in the linux world. They look just enough like plan9 that people think they represent those ideas, and so they have no idea how powerful those ideas can actually be and don't even know that they don't know it. We'll never have any of the things it really promised until we give up on POSIX, tb…
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Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)
#5The most frustrating thing to ever happen to the concepts in plan9 is the funhouse mirror distortions of them that have landed in the linux world. They look just enough like plan9 that people think they represent those ideas, and so they have no idea how powerful those ideas can actually be and don't even know that they don't know it. We'll never have any of the things it really promised until we give up on POSIX, tb…
> 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
I would call it maybe vageuly similar, but it is by no means a subset. It has some features in common and many that are completely nonsense in a posix context.
The most pressing problem for implementing plan9-like semantics in a POSIX system is the permission system. In particular, setuid as a mechanism for privilege escalation. This is a big part of why users can't make their own namespaces on linux without help/intervention from root-owned processes (like dockerd or systemd).
Think about it: if you can make the file namespace any shape you want, and then run `sudo`, which is a setuid process that looks at /etc/sudo.conf to decide whether your escalation is allowed, how do you secure it?
How do you even begin to do distributed permissions if everything's looking at /etc/passwd and /etc/group in the current process' namespace to decide who you are?
POSIX is very much built on the idea of a canonical view of the filesystem, and plan9 is built on a vfs that may as well be sand.
Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)
#6The most frustrating thing to ever happen to the concepts in plan9 is the funhouse mirror distortions of them that have landed in the linux world. They look just enough like plan9 that people think they represent those ideas, and so they have no idea how powerful those ideas can actually be and don't even know that they don't know it. We'll never have any of the things it really promised until we give up on POSIX, tb…
> 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
A good starting point:
Note that this - as almost everything else that is plan 9 related - is dated.
Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)
#7Unix 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?
Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)
#8The most frustrating thing to ever happen to the concepts in plan9 is the funhouse mirror distortions of them that have landed in the linux world. They look just enough like plan9 that people think they represent those ideas, and so they have no idea how powerful those ideas can actually be and don't even know that they don't know it. We'll never have any of the things it really promised until we give up on POSIX, tb…
> 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 other hand intentionally broke compatibility with its predecessors and had those same features that were glued recklessly on top of each other in various unices thoughtfully redesigned from scratch, often omitting stuff that didn't seem relevant enough to its authors.
Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)
#9Unix 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.
Re: Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)
#10Unix 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?
> 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?
An AT&T that was willing to do that would have been willing to let BSDI slide. Linux would have died in the crib and we'd all be using BSD right now.