Getting Plan 9 Running on the Raspberry Pi

http://bendyworks.com/geekville/lab_projects/2012/11/getting-plan-9-running-on-the-raspberry-pi

by listrophy • 14 years ago

96 34 14 years ago

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Nicely done, now we need a MULTICS port to the Raspberry Pi, lets get real folks!

jacquesm• 14 years ago

I don't see much use for MULTICS but plan9 is a pretty neat OS and it would be nice to see more of its ideas incorporated into mainstream unix.

Especially its consistency is something worth having.

zobzu• 14 years ago

I think that's an important point. People see plan9 as another "fun" "side os" for OS lovers.

Plan9 is actually a good OS. It certainly offer features that are much ahead of OSX, GNU/Linux, Windows, you name it.

The only reason why we aren't using Plan9 _right now_ is because nobody found a way to make money with it. Sad, but true.

Microsoft had similar ideas and pushed them with the Singularity project. It stopped for the same reasons. People are ok buying and developing for "more archaic" systems, that will probably (very) slowly evolve into something similar to what Plan9/Singularity have been offering for quite some time now.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

Anyone has the MULTICS source floating around?

edit: http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/

BTW, someone was running OS/360 under Hercules on a Pi. I once tried to get it running on Symbian, without success . It'd be cool to have a maintain in my pocket

anonymous• 14 years ago

Plan 9 is really somewhat of a sad case. It's a beautiful gem that just exists by itself.

AceJohnny2• 14 years ago

As I understand it, Unix was a research OS that was accidentally sold. Then they made Plan 9 and that stayed a research OS, because Unix was good enough in the market.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

It wasn't accidentally sold. It was developed as a side project. I believe Bell Labs was required by a court ruling to license it for free, which aided in the initial growth in popularity.

If I had to guess why Plan 9 stayed a research OS- well, Plan 9 was first released to universities in 1992. Linux was first released in 1991, 386BSD was launched in 1992, FreeBSD and NetBSD forked in 1993.

Nursie• 14 years ago

I've always like what I've read about Plan 9, nice to see it's kept going.

jerf2• 14 years ago

I've begun flagging all the "I RAN A PROGRAM ON THE RPI" posts, but this is an exception. Though I'd still go VM: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/installing_plan_9_on_q...

scoot• 14 years ago

this is an exception

Why? This isn't even "how I got X to run on RasPi" - it's "I ran the image that someone else created". Period. That's it. Um, wow.

devin4• 14 years ago

If you're not on the 9fans mailing list there's a pretty good chance you would have missed this. Hats off to Chris for catching this and taking the time to try it out. I had a lot of fun toying around with acme earlier today as a result.

jerf2• 14 years ago

Because I would have simply assumed that an obscure OS would lack driver support.

9pi3• 14 years ago

An advantage of going native rather than VM, especially with an OS as small and simple as Plan 9, is that you can have complete control and understanding of what's running on your machine - no mystery processes you didn't start, no little webservers opening ports behind your back...

lloeki2• 14 years ago

On OSX, you'd rather change the dd line to the much faster:

    dd bs=1m if=9pi.img of=/dev/rdisk1

twopoint718• 14 years ago

Thanks! I'll add this.

blhack• 14 years ago

There is nothing special about OSX in this case. Just change this to bs=1024 regardless.

idupree• 14 years ago

Linux's disk caching is good enough that I haven't been able to observe a difference when I change bs= on Linux. But it certainly won't hurt.

lloeki2• 14 years ago

You missed it:

1. bs was already included in the post (FWIW the shorthand is '1M' in Linux, and that's 1048576 :-))

2. I was referring to the use of disk vs rdisk (i.e buffered vs unbuffered/raw, see details[0]), which IIRC is a BSD-ism.

Using rdisk gives a tenfold increase in speed here. Without it you're nowhere near USB2 speeds.

[0] http://lists.apple.com/archives/filesystem-dev/2012/Feb/msg0...

eschaton• 14 years ago

What about the Oberon system, has anyone brought it to Raspberry Pi yet?

xradionut• 14 years ago

Which Oberon system???

Genode would be useful, since it can run on the Pandaboard.

chadzawistowski2• 14 years ago

Here is an HN discussion of the Oberon system. I believe it was written in the language of the same name.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593323

pdw• 14 years ago

Don't think so, but it seems Wirth is revising the Project Oberon book. This time he'll include the design of his own RISC CPU, targeting a $100 FPGA board. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJIqHIYSDrk

devin4• 14 years ago

Now, take your Raspberry Pi running Plan9, and start setting up Inferno OS on all of your other machines. Let your imagination run wild.

devin4• 14 years ago

Step 1) Install Plan9 on Raspberry Pi

Step 2) Run the Inferno-OS VM on your primary machine

Step 3) Let your imagination run wild.

chadzawistowski2• 14 years ago

I don't know much about Plan 9 or Inferno-OS. Does that combination have something to do with distributed computing?

doublec• 14 years ago

Inferno and Plan 9 make it easy to share resources (cpu, disk, etc) and make them appear as if they were local. For example, sharing resources on a phone running inferno: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2012/11/07/sharing-computer-and...

rwmj• 14 years ago

It's amazing how much better xz is at compressing that disk image:

    -rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones 143473160 Nov 26 11:53 9pi.img.gz
    -rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones  60972776 Dec  1 11:48 9pi.img.xz

maidenhead• 14 years ago

Plan 9 is significantly more recent than Unix: Back when Unix was first invented, graphics existed but there were more kinds of graphics devices, and it wasn't entirely clear that vector graphics, for example, wouldn't become the way forward and deserve the majority of developer attention.

Getting Plan 9 Running on the Raspberry Pi

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