A bit of clarity (Score 5)

DISCLAIMER: even though my email address says @bell-labs.com I'm not speaking for anyone other than myself here.

Having lived pretty much exclusively in Plan9 and Inferno for several years now, allow me to make the following observations:

To answer the question about the Sparc kernel: cross compilers are distributed for:

• 68k, arm, alpha, x86, sparc, mpc, and mips

Kernel source is distributed for:

• alpha, mips, mpc, and x86

Absent from this list is the Sparc kernel.

So: there is a Sparc compiler, but no kernel. However, if you have Plan 9 2nd edition, you have a sparc kernel that could quickly be ported to the new system.

NOTE: The underlying system architecture is largely irrelevant in Plan 9. I italicized cross because there is no distinction between compiling and/or debugging something for the architecture you're running on vs. some other architecture.

When people describe one of Plan 9's features as "everything is a file", it's misleading. Especially since your typical nix weenie will come back with "But everything in my nix is a file too".

You'll get a better picture of the Plan 9 environment by thinking of a device driver as a "file server". That is, a device driver exports a hierarchical filesystem rather than a single file. The driver entry points correspond to the basic filesystem operations (rather than the basic *file* operations, as in nix). To make a horrible analogy, think of a Plan 9 device driver as implementing the vnode interface. In actual fact, it implements an interface to the "9p" protocol.

For example, here's a du(1) of the /net directory.

A few devices are bound into /net:

• #l - ethernet
• #I - ip
• #D - SSL

Also, a couple of user level file servers have posted communication channels in /net:

• cs - connection server
• dns - dns server