4 ms·

After a bunch of reading, I still have no idea what this is. Some Linux variant?

gouggoug 9y ago
Same here. I know of Plan 9, but have no idea what this grid thing is. I, however, just went on to the old project's page[0] and found this: > Q: What is the /9/grid? > A: A project begun by users of 4chan's technolo/g/y board to setup a free, decentralized grid computing network, available to users of any OS. By integrating Plan 9 based networking technologies (via Plan 9, Inferno, 9vx, or others) with our usual OSes, we can create transparent networks of whatever content and services we want. Note that there are several different projects using the term 9grid, the resources here are only a small portion of the world of Plan 9 + Inferno based distributed systems. [0] http://www.9gridchan.org/archive/9grid_FAQ http://www.9gridchan.org/archive/9grid_FAQ
jf 9y ago
Plan 9 is an amazing, inspirational, and futuristic operating system from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs One of the things that Plan 9 can do is seamlessly treat remote resources as if they were local. From what I can tell, this is a remote grid that you can connect a local Plan 9 instance to.
- woolvalley 9y ago
  Do these i/o interfaces tell you their expected latency and throughput numbers? I could see some fairly silly code being written because they didn't realize that file was actually a a bad cell phone connection.
  - nl 9y ago
    The main author of Plan 9 was Rob Pike. He knows a little bit about networked software. I actually had Plan 9 working on some Sun 3/50s at one point. You could use it over a 2400 baud modem... a kind of broken one where I had to listen to the connection noises and twiddle the wires at the right moment to make it connect. A bad cell phone connection would have been nice.
  - mveety 9y ago
    Honestly its not so bad over a bad cell connection as long as latency isn't extreme. I've found that throughput isn't a huge issue, but latency is a killer.
- mappu 9y ago
  KIO does some similarly magical things e.g. click a URL to a jpg file, and it opens in your picture viewer app instead of the browser.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Supposedly KIO is what OLE was supposed to be. Never seen it taken beyond KDE though. Then again, KDE had/has many things that nobody seems interested in replicating. like how Konqueror could be divided much like a tiled WM, with each tile holding anything from (khtml driven) web sites, to local, ssh, smb or ftp directories, or even terminals (iirc). One could basically create just the right tool for a local or remote file management job one needed. Sadly i have abandoned KDE since the debacle that was 4.0...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mhd 9y ago
Some Oberon variant, by people really invested in Unix.
tadfisher 9y ago
Imagine if Unix was invented after the invention of things like networking and GUIs. Basically, take the core concepts of Unix, like "everything is a file" and "the only protocol is bytes", and make an operating system which religiously sticks to those principles while supporting modern, difficult-to-abstract systems. For example, on Linux you'd load a web page by instructing a program to open an (AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM) socket, tell the kernel to connect() to some destination, send some bytes, read some bytes, and render those bytes as a page on your screen using another set of userspace libraries and system calls. Whereas, on plan9, you might mount a remote server to a local namespace, look for the page you want, then pipe that file through an HTML renderer and the output to a display server. Or you might echo "connect 192.168.0.1!80" into /net/tcp/0/ctl, and read the result from /net/tcp/0/data. Linux has borrowed several things from plan9, including /proc and /net, and you can even set up your system so you can pipe things to /dev/tcp. The single abstraction of files is a pretty good one for exposing all sorts of functionality to userspace, so you can get pretty good at doing just about anything without needing to drop into C or otherwise asking the kernel directly. Disclaimer: I'm not a plan9 user, and I'm not saying that files are the best userspace abstraction.
- schoen 9y ago
  > and you can even set up your system so you can pipe things to /dev/tcp The bash shell supports /dev/tcp by default for file descriptor redirections (so people who are using bash can already do this!).
  - bitwize 9y ago
    But it doesn't generalize outside of bash -- and where do you think bash got the idea from?
    - schoen 9y ago
      I'm sure bash got the idea from Plan 9, although I didn't know that until recently.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Same here. I know of Plan 9, but have no idea what this grid thing is. I, however, just went on to the old project's page[0] and found this: > Q: What is the /9/grid? > A: A project begun by users of 4chan's technolo/g/y board to setup a free, decentralized grid computing network, available to users of any OS. By integrating Plan 9 based networking technologies (via Plan 9, Inferno, 9vx, or others) with our usual OSes, we can create transparent networks of whatever content and services we want. Note that there are several different projects using the term 9grid, the resources here are only a small portion of the world of Plan 9 + Inferno based distributed systems. [0] http://www.9gridchan.org/archive/9grid_FAQ http://www.9gridchan.org/archive/9grid_FAQ

jf 9y ago

Plan 9 is an amazing, inspirational, and futuristic operating system from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs One of the things that Plan 9 can do is seamlessly treat remote resources as if they were local. From what I can tell, this is a remote grid that you can connect a local Plan 9 instance to.

woolvalley 9y ago
Do these i/o interfaces tell you their expected latency and throughput numbers? I could see some fairly silly code being written because they didn't realize that file was actually a a bad cell phone connection.
- nl 9y ago
  The main author of Plan 9 was Rob Pike. He knows a little bit about networked software. I actually had Plan 9 working on some Sun 3/50s at one point. You could use it over a 2400 baud modem... a kind of broken one where I had to listen to the connection noises and twiddle the wires at the right moment to make it connect. A bad cell phone connection would have been nice.
- mveety 9y ago
  Honestly its not so bad over a bad cell connection as long as latency isn't extreme. I've found that throughput isn't a huge issue, but latency is a killer.
mappu 9y ago
KIO does some similarly magical things e.g. click a URL to a jpg file, and it opens in your picture viewer app instead of the browser.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Supposedly KIO is what OLE was supposed to be. Never seen it taken beyond KDE though. Then again, KDE had/has many things that nobody seems interested in replicating. like how Konqueror could be divided much like a tiled WM, with each tile holding anything from (khtml driven) web sites, to local, ssh, smb or ftp directories, or even terminals (iirc). One could basically create just the right tool for a local or remote file management job one needed. Sadly i have abandoned KDE since the debacle that was 4.0...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mhd 9y ago

Some Oberon variant, by people really invested in Unix.

tadfisher 9y ago

Imagine if Unix was invented after the invention of things like networking and GUIs. Basically, take the core concepts of Unix, like "everything is a file" and "the only protocol is bytes", and make an operating system which religiously sticks to those principles while supporting modern, difficult-to-abstract systems. For example, on Linux you'd load a web page by instructing a program to open an (AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM) socket, tell the kernel to connect() to some destination, send some bytes, read some bytes, and render those bytes as a page on your screen using another set of userspace libraries and system calls. Whereas, on plan9, you might mount a remote server to a local namespace, look for the page you want, then pipe that file through an HTML renderer and the output to a display server. Or you might echo "connect 192.168.0.1!80" into /net/tcp/0/ctl, and read the result from /net/tcp/0/data. Linux has borrowed several things from plan9, including /proc and /net, and you can even set up your system so you can pipe things to /dev/tcp. The single abstraction of files is a pretty good one for exposing all sorts of functionality to userspace, so you can get pretty good at doing just about anything without needing to drop into C or otherwise asking the kernel directly. Disclaimer: I'm not a plan9 user, and I'm not saying that files are the best userspace abstraction.

schoen 9y ago
> and you can even set up your system so you can pipe things to /dev/tcp The bash shell supports /dev/tcp by default for file descriptor redirections (so people who are using bash can already do this!).
- bitwize 9y ago
  But it doesn't generalize outside of bash -- and where do you think bash got the idea from?
  - schoen 9y ago
    I'm sure bash got the idea from Plan 9, although I didn't know that until recently.
- dredmorbius 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]