What People Like About the Plan 9 OS

http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/what_do_people_like_about_plan_9/index.html

by rbc • 13 years ago

119 71 13 years ago

rdtsc2• 13 years ago

I was fascinated with Plan 9. It just has really cool ideas in its design.

It has been said before and I agree. The problem with Plan 9 adoption isn't Plan 9. Plan 9 is beautiful. The problem is that Linux is quite alright as well.

Also, Linux has drivers for more hardware when Plan 9 was ready to be played with. Plan 9 doesn't. It is a chicken and egg problem. I remember trying Plan 9 and it just didn't have drivers for some of my hardware. It was like Linux in back in the days.

pjmlp7• 13 years ago

Plan9 is fine if you only care about daemons and command line interfaces.

klrr• 13 years ago

Unix is more command line oriented, honestly. Plan 9's is really GUI centric, although not a ordinary GUI.

nmcfarl3• 13 years ago

Which is fantastic endorsement. GUIs and the Web may be nice for mucking about - but when I work - I work on the command line (or in emacs). All I truly care about is daemons and command line interfaces.

Of course - my daemons and command line interfaces have to produce pretty output, for people who care about other things. But those people are not me.

So I installed Plan 9 from User Space[1] last night - largely on this recommendation :)

[1] http://swtch.com/plan9port/

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

Well, the problem with Plan 9 is that it requires everything support the Plan 9 protocol. The entire stack has to speak Plan 9, otherwise nothing works. So anything that interacts with it would have to support the full protocol, whereas Unix is just "pipe this output stream into that input stream," which is quite a lot easier to adopt.

p9idf• 13 years ago

It's not unusual for an operating system to require its programs to use its system calls. A Unix program that doesn't speak Unix protocols is just as useless as a Plan 9 program that doesn't speak Plan 9 protocols. It's a moot point though, since you'd have a difficult time unwittingly making a compiler generate a program that doesn't work on its own operating system.

Pipes on Plan 9 use the same pipe, read, write, and close system calls as Unix does; they are an equivalent amount of work to use (or adopt, as you say).

throwaway2048• 13 years ago

its important to note that "speaking the plan9 protocol" amounts to normal file operations like read(), write(), stat() etc. This also works fine with pipes.

derefr4• 13 years ago

I'm amazed that "drivers" are still a consideration in OS design anywhere other than embedded systems. Why aren't we writing our operating systems to target hardware-abstracting hypervisors yet? Isn't that an obvious separation of concerns?

gizmo686• 13 years ago

Isn't the BIOS supposed to be the hardware abstracting layer we run our programs directly on? That doesn't work any more (because BIOS is a legacy mess), so now we have kernels that act as the hardware abstraction, and write operating systems on top of those. Of course, now you need to target you operating system to a kernel.

shin_lao3• 13 years ago

It's the job of the OS to provide the hardware abstraction layer...

sanderjd3• 13 years ago

I can't reply to your comment below, but in reply to it as well as this one: I'd love to read a good article about how this would work. I may or may not be able to piece it together from your erlangonxen and openmirage links, but it would also be great if someone knowledgeable (you?) would write about it!

nly2• 13 years ago

Someone has to write the drivers for the hypervisor. A hypervisor is nothing but a minimal OS that provides a different set of resource management guarantees. You can't make many of those guarantees without access to the hardware.

ksrm• 13 years ago

Wasn't EFI supposed to at least partially address this issue?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Int...

rektide• 13 years ago

  The problem is that Linux is quite alright as well.

The advantage of plan9 was "at scale," being able to commingle multiple system's resources in interesting novel ways.

This has never been and still is in no ways Linux's strength. Linux is inward focused: a monolithic kernel designed to serve as a pleasant base for anything running under it.

There are probably near a thousand different Node.js projects each implementing some kind of coordination layer between Node.js processes (ex: https://github.com/amino/amino) and similar efforts abound on for all other applications to be coded against (Hazelcast, Hadoop, &c). Why?

It's all done as application framework level because the Linux operating system's design space is sitting on a box and running. The fanciest interconnect you're going to get is when you first modprobe in USB-IP (allows network control of a usb peripheral). It's downhill, and back to writing applications if you want to push on.

Linux is definitely quite alright. We're fine with Hadoop, running on the JVM, running on Linux. We were delighted to have a desktop Unix, to have X running- the never ending parade of "year of the linux desktop" stories, year after year. Linux arose when we wanted better ways to run things on a box, and most problems fit on a box. Linux was what we wanted, took care of the pressing matter of running a single box, and it was good at that, whereas when it and Plan9 were in their early days, it was a harsh and hostile landscape and we weren't good at working within the confines of the box.

Plan9 has always been for those cases where you abutted the constraints of the box, and wanted to think more openly more broadly about the problems about us- and plan9 was for those who wanted to reap solutions that could scale and reach out in a common interoperable serviceable way. It was ahead of it's time, and we couldn't picture the use of a fabric that would let the boxes work together, in part because boxes were still rapidly individually advancing from the very crude, hard to use machines of the mainframe days into things we could begin to use. Thanks Linux for getting us so far, but I tend towards suspecting that thinking of a running environment that thinks chiefly of itself, that remains firmly about it's own box, is too old world to be of much real service these days.

rdtsc2• 13 years ago

There are probably near a thousand different Node.js projects each implementing some kind of coordination layer between Node.js processes (ex: https://github.com/amino/amino) and similar efforts abound on for all other applications to be coded against (Hazelcast, Hadoop, &c). Why?

There is only one Erlang though and it has been around for 20+ years. It has built in distribution and automatic failover. Yes it is built on top of Linux/Mac/Windows OS.

But wait, that's not all. There is this project that basically attempts to thin out the OS and replace it with Erlang -- http://erlangonxen.org/ -- Erlang VM implemented on top of Xen hypervisor. To make it even more interesting and bring it back home -- the underlying clustering support is based on 9P (the plan 9 distribution protocol). I think that is pretty cool.

rbc7• 13 years ago

You can run Plan 9 under Xen, Amazon AWS being one of those places. I've been running it under VirtualBox as well. If you are already using virtualization, the Plan 9 device drivers may be less of an issue.

RamiK2• 13 years ago

Qemu(KVM) works as well.

carterschonwald• 13 years ago

Woah: I didn't realize there was still active work on plan 9. They've participated in Gsoc the past four years even!

D9u3• 13 years ago

http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/what_do_people_lik...

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/faq

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/

    Connection refused: plan9.bell-labs.com:80

I can't access any of the above... :(

nanofortnight• 13 years ago

Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.pla...

rbc7• 13 years ago

I guess news.ycombinator.com sent them more traffic than they are accustomed to. Oops... Sorry guys.

tomphoolery• 13 years ago

Solution: stop webserver? :P

rbanffy2• 13 years ago

We killed their server. Again... :-(

rbc7• 13 years ago

There are Amazon AMI's for plan 9, called plan9-fossil. You don't use ssh to get in though. You need to use the plan 9 "cpu" command, using the "ec2" user and a random password printed on the instance console/system log. I have a plan 9 host running under VirtualBox that I used to access my Amazon Plan 9 host. It worked just great. Another little item is you have to allow TCP access to ports 17010 and 17013 on the instance.

sanderjd3• 13 years ago

Are there any ports of the `cpu` command for other operating systems?

rbc7• 13 years ago

Use drawterm. It is a X11 application that allows you to connect to a remote Plan 9 server.

nmcfarl3• 13 years ago

Some details on that ami:

Specs: http://thecloudmarket.com/image/ami-cfa332ff--plan9-fossil#/...

Link to launch via AWS Console: https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home?region=us-west-2#lau...

frozenport• 13 years ago

Plan 9 was also slow and didn't support a normal version of GCC.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

rbc7• 13 years ago

If you want more of a unix like build environment on Plan 9, you'll probably want the Plan 9 ANSI/POSIX Environment (APE).

weland2• 13 years ago

That's partly due to historical reasons I think. Some of the platforms they intended to run Plan 9 on had very buggy GCC ports. It's also worth noting that that the "native" Plan 9 compilers had some quirks of their own (see http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/compiler ). It was never really intended to be a very familiar Unix environment, and they tried to straighten up a couple of things even in the way software is written. There is a POSIX environment available (the APE) but I don't know much about it, I never really tried it.

To be fair, between the "good enough" phenomenon and the licensing problems, it never really took off, which is rather sad.

dasil0032• 13 years ago

I think to really understand what makes Plan 9 great requires a deep understanding of Unix, but once you have a deep understanding of Unix...

iv_08• 13 years ago

Plan 9 was basically the successor of Unix by the same research group, more modern, taking the ideas of Unix further, a distributed operating system with full network transparency, better shell (actually, rc already replaced the Bourne shell in version 10 Unix) and lots of other goodies such as the plumber. And it served as the "reference implementation" for UTF-8.

pjmlp7• 13 years ago

And yet, like many cool ideas, the world was not ready for it.

Nowadays it does not matter any longer.

dasil0032• 13 years ago

I understand all that. My point was that if you know enough to appreciate Plan 9 then you know enough to take advantage of the *nix ecosystem as it exists today, which is far too mature for Plan 9 to catch up to. We can always dream though...

rcarmo• 13 years ago

Interesting. Serendipitously, I just came across some GSOC posts regarding getting Java on it:

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/plan9-gsoc

If that turns out OK and someone manages to port a browser over, it might be a good environment to do run Clojure.

WasimBhai• 13 years ago

Considering plan9 is so great for distributed computing, those with Big Data experience, do you think it is only a matter of time before plan9 replaces other operating systems being used in map-reduce, clustered environments?

tete• 13 years ago

A bit sad that the page is down.

However, people interested into (vanilla) Plan 9 might also be interested in this:

http://code.google.com/p/plan9front/

lectrick• 13 years ago

It's a revolutionary OS hampered by licensing.

Open source the goddamn thing to save its ideas at this point before they are lost to nerd-history and let's see what happens.

RamiK2• 13 years ago

Plan9 been free and open source for over a decade (2003). At first it was released with some very unusual constraints(Lucent Public License v1.0). But those were quickly lifted(Lucent Public License v1.02).

GNU's stance on the revised license seems mostly favorable with some mild reservations: http://gplv3.fsf.org/wiki/index.php/Lucent_Public_License_ve...

a0• 13 years ago

One of my favorite features of Plan 9 is the extremely powerful filesystem abstraction through the 9p file protocol. It is incredible how clean becomes the design of the applications and the communication between the modules with a simple file interface. Currently I'm working on potential extension of this idea - an ontology-based virtual filesystem, where the files are replaced by objects and the organization is defined by relations, instead of the hierarchical structures.

matiasb• 13 years ago

9p is really cool. I've seen a lot of papers about it, and some experiments done at university.

https://code.google.com/p/diod/wiki/protocol#Sample_Session

http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/2007/08/v9fs-performance-ve...

http://9p.cat-v.org/implementations

What People Like About the Plan 9 OS

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