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The 9P protocol truly is a beautiful work of engineering. There's actually another informal extension called 9P2000.e which is used by Erlang on Xen that adds s

The 9P protocol truly is a beautiful work of engineering. There's actually another informal extension called 9P2000.e which is used by Erlang on Xen that adds session keys and a few new macro-operations (read whole file; overwrite contents) composed from lower level T/Rmsgs, but with ability to gracefully fall back to 9P2000. Linux v9fs has its own 9P2000.L in addition to the standard: https://github.com/chaos/diod/blob/master/protocol.md https://github.com/chaos/diod/blob/master/protocol.md Either way, it's much more elegant and portable than something like FUSE.

0x006A 11y ago
but why is FUSE used more often?
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  FUSE is an informally specified one-stop library that explicitly targets the Linux VFS, so it might be considered more convenient for whatever reason. There's also a general lack of knowledge about Plan 9 and Inferno on anything beyond a superficial level, though this might be improving. 9P is a small generic protocol that is often independently implemented because of its simplicity, so there are many heterogenous libraries for it.
  - jude- 11y ago
    However, FUSE implementations are actively maintained for all the BSDs and OS X as well.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Which required significant kernel additions in the case of the BSDs, and is a third-party kext for OS X. In contrast, 9P is just a byte stream protocol that ranges from weekend project implementations in ~1000 LoC (yet still perfectly usable) to full strength client-server libraries. It's much more versatile and can be done entirely in userspace without special kernel cooperation beyond a basic POSIX runtime.
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
What's the typical way to handle transport security on 9p2000 or 9p?
- gecko 11y ago
  It's just SSL; you can get more information at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.html. There is also factotum, which serves a purpose somewhere between ssh-agent and an OS X-style Keychain.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  See for instance: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/9p_services_using_srv,_listen,_exportfs,_import/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/9p_services_using_srv,... TLS tunneling is common. v9fs and diod give SSH port forwarding as an option. It's very generic, so the options are plentiful. 9P is formally transport-agnostic, from what I recall. Plan 9 natively preferred IL over TCP for a while before officially deprecating it around 2003.

0x006A 11y ago

but why is FUSE used more often?

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
FUSE is an informally specified one-stop library that explicitly targets the Linux VFS, so it might be considered more convenient for whatever reason. There's also a general lack of knowledge about Plan 9 and Inferno on anything beyond a superficial level, though this might be improving. 9P is a small generic protocol that is often independently implemented because of its simplicity, so there are many heterogenous libraries for it.
- jude- 11y ago
  However, FUSE implementations are actively maintained for all the BSDs and OS X as well.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Which required significant kernel additions in the case of the BSDs, and is a third-party kext for OS X. In contrast, 9P is just a byte stream protocol that ranges from weekend project implementations in ~1000 LoC (yet still perfectly usable) to full strength client-server libraries. It's much more versatile and can be done entirely in userspace without special kernel cooperation beyond a basic POSIX runtime.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

What's the typical way to handle transport security on 9p2000 or 9p?

gecko 11y ago
It's just SSL; you can get more information at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.html. There is also factotum, which serves a purpose somewhere between ssh-agent and an OS X-style Keychain.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
See for instance: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/9p_services_using_srv,_listen,_exportfs,_import/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/9p_services_using_srv,... TLS tunneling is common. v9fs and diod give SSH port forwarding as an option. It's very generic, so the options are plentiful. 9P is formally transport-agnostic, from what I recall. Plan 9 natively preferred IL over TCP for a while before officially deprecating it around 2003.