Driving Plan 9 226
Glenda_lives_on writes "OSnews has an alternative OS review on Plan 9. Plan 9 is a research OS produced by Bell Labs. It was open sourced a few years back, and has enjoyed a revival of sorts. Los Alamos National Labs is continuing to favor Plan 9 for their new generation of super computing because its the fastest thing out there. I have downloaded and ran Plan 9 before. In fact the Plan 9 live cd sits here on my desk. Its not an operating system for noobs however, and lacks some graphical refinement. Plan 9 is a very cool and a interesting test drive however. Its definitely worth the price of admission (free) for exploring, and education."
Zzzzzzz..... (Score:5, Interesting)
What was good about the "everything is a file" metaphor was not the "file" part, but the "everything is a...." part.
What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system. It would be something like a Lisp OS but with an object database type file system. I think some have existed in academia, but I've never looked into them.
/proc on steroids (Score:5, Interesting)
Really cool how _everything_ was a file.
To start a program on some machine, he would cd to some directory corresponding to the machine. I don't remember exactly, but this directory had files corresponding to "exe", "stdin", and "stdout" among others. To start a job, the program was just copied to the exe file. And then if you looked at the "stdout" file, the output from the running job was there. Now you can imagine how launching a job on thousands of machines and collecting the output becomes really trivial.
I got the impression that this was sort of like the Linux /proc filesystem, but expanded to work seamlessly across a cluster and with more functionality.
Plan9 runs on Xenopix DVD (Score:2, Interesting)
http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/xen/index-en.
Xenoppix is a combination of Virtual Machine Monitor "Xen" and 1CD/DVD "KNOPPIX".
It runs Plan9 and NetBSD on Xen-DomU(GuestOS) and KNOPPIX on XenDom0(HostOS).
Re:The review is not so great (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Plan 9 is cool (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course, I assume the Plan9 developers thought of that too, and there are provisions in the design for this sort of thing.
Re:Now YOU look stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh, but you are mistaken in your praise of Plan 9, most of us Ed Wood aficionados knows that that isn't his masterpiece, indeed it is trivial in comparison to the behemoth of Glen or Glenda [imdb.com] (also known on sensational posters as "I Changed My Sex!"), wherein Wood himself stars as transvestite and Bela Lugosi is an insane rambling doctor.
All jokes aside, Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.
Re:"lacks some graphical refinement" (Score:2, Interesting)
PlanB (based on Plan9) (Score:2, Interesting)
As an alternative to Plan9, you may try also PlanB [lsub.org], a distributed operating system based on Plan9.
Re:EULA - Weapons of Mass Destruction?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing epitomizes, to me, the Plan 9 attitude like your remark later in the thread about how not having shared libraries is something to celebrate (it's a feature, not a bug!). I'm aware that you didn't just make this up; it's a pretty common thing for Plan 9 implementers and fans to say. Yes, shared libraries are awkward to implement and do some nasty things to the semantics of your run time.
However, out there in the real world, programmers are frequently required to use complicated, feature-rich libraries that do things undreamt-of on Plan 9 (e.g. create a user interface that looks and works even vaguely like the user interface from any other recent system, for example). The fact that Rob Pike's taste for minimalism in user interfaces conveniently scales down the size of the UI library to almost nothing is neither here nor there. acme is a neat idea, but if you wanted to make the argument that shared libraries are bogus, then you need to show that you can deliver something that's as substantial as the functionality of existing libraries through other means (e.g a user-level file server).
The tendency of Plan 9 boosters to write off anything that they don't need to do as 'obviously inelegant and not worth doing' is fine, but it's hard to see how one can draw system design lessons from it.
Unfair to Ed Woods (Score:4, Interesting)
In some sense, sure, but on the other hand, that is grossly unfair to Ed Wood's beneficial relationship to Lugosi. Consider the following (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi [wikipedia.org], but which agrees with similar details from some films on the subject, including one with Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, from some years back):
( [*] Plan 9 was a posthumous performance, and note that the death of Lugosi early in filming was precisely the reason that Plan 9 became "the worst film ever made" rather than merely the usual Ed Wood grade B movie.)
Yes, Wood was a hack (albeit a fun one with a cult following to this day), but he did his best to rescue Lugosi when the rest of the world had given up and no longer cared. Give credit where credit is due, rather than simply sneering at the charitable, no matter the flaws you see in the good samaritan. By all accounts, Wood seems to have done the best he could by Lugosi.