11 ms·

Plan 9 Desktop Guide

238 points by signa11 5y ago

rawoke083600 5y ago
There is just something about these 'old' Operating Systems that takes me back to my super geeky youth :) Sitting in my bedroom with my 386 and trying to install Linux from stiffies and getting IPChains to dnsmasq/forward basically share the dial up connection for 'the house' lol the other 386 ! #GoodTimes :)
hulitu 5y ago
So it is or it is not possible to run X11 on Plan 9 ? The article says that it runs twm and then later that it is possible to run linux program through an emulation layer.
- nrr 5y ago
  It's complicated. The port of X11 that the article talks about is the one that's on the old Bell Labs web site[0], and it never really worked all that well for me. Linuxemu is something of a research project, and I don't recall it working all that well either. You can get a Unix-alike (e.g., OpenBSD) running under 9front's vmx(1), and that will get you access to X11, albeit not running natively atop a Plan 9 kernel, which is likely not what you're after. 0: http://9p.io/plan9/addons.html http://9p.io/plan9/addons.html
- butterisgood 5y ago
  More than 10 years ago I ran one by fgb named "equis". Only reference I can find quickly is here https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/x11_installation/index.html https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/x11_installation/index.html I used it with the linux emulation layer someone was building to run Mozilla on Plan 9, but none of those were continued as far as I know.
pjmlp 5y ago
A Plan 9 site that actually talks about Inferno as well, there is some hope after all.
- rcarmo 5y ago
  I've actually found Inferno a lot more interesting than Plan 9. Dis is very, very neat, and I sort of wish we had modern runtimes for it.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Same here, another similar endveour around the time was the Amiga reboot attempt as TAO, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-12-red-vs-blue/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami... https://www.eetimes.com/amiga-reborn-via-tao-alliance/ https://www.eetimes.com/amiga-reborn-via-tao-alliance/
    - ghostDancer 5y ago
      First time about TAO, was in EDGE magazine in the early 90s IIRC about their OS TAOS sounded something from the future , could run on different processor even over a network, they had it running on a machine using transputers. It looked like sci-fi to me.
  - patrec 5y ago
    What do you see as significant advantages of Dis over WASM? [edit: my guess would be channel support, but it would be interesting to hear more about that]
    - MisterTea 5y ago
      Its not so much dis but the whole concept of an OS built on top of a VM. This means the entirety of user space is portable across platforms. There is no way to run native code. It is possible to port wasm to inferno and replace dis. That could open up some interesting possibilities. You could write code in any language, spit out wasm and run it on any cpu/OS via inferno.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Welcome to Burroughs (nowadays ClearPath MCP), Xerox PARC workstations, UCSD Pascal, Lilith, Oberon, IBM i and z/OS, and a couple more. J2ME, Windows Phone 7, watchOS and Android are arguably the closest to it in mainstream computing.
rcarmo 5y ago
This is by far the most comprehensive Plan 9 walkthrough I've read in the past couple of years. I've been running a Raspberry Pi as an all-in-one Plan 9 setup for a long while now (as a sort of catch-all minimalist dev environment/console), and the two main showstoppers for me have been: - The reliance on a three button mouse, which makes it impossible to use Plan 9 on a modern laptop without finagling with modifier keys (no, I don't want to go back to using a mouse, thanks). - The utter lack of any minimally usable browser (I know, the browser would be larger than the OS, but it is a major issue for any kind of work today). It is an excellent system to dig into and learn from, but there are many paper cuts when using it daily: SSH/terminals work differently, VNC/Remote Desktop clients are... weird, etc. (rd sort of works, and sort of doesn't, and without it really working I can't even read documentation online unless it's plaintext). All in all, this is a great thing to see as I hope new things are built atop Plan 9 (when it makes sense), but as a minimal desktop environment I've moved to Openbox + xterm + Firefox, and have been pondering setting up Chromium OS on a beefier Raspberry Pi, since most "consoles" are just web-based these days anyway...
- Kototama 5y ago
  It's probably unfair to compare Plan9 to "modern" operating systems. Why not talk about everything it got right and smart instead of all the things which behave differently than what our expectations set?
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    I'm just pointing out the shortcomings I found. I've been using it and keeping tabs on resources for Plan 9 and Inferno since 2014: - https://taoofmac.com/space/os/plan9 https://taoofmac.com/space/os/plan9 ...so I do know a lot about it in practice. It's just that, also in practice, nearly ten years of tinkering with it have been mesmerising, mostly fun, but not useful enough for my particular use cases. YMMV.
  - gonzus 5y ago
    I want to answer trying to interpret the GP. For me, I want to be able to tinker with Plan 9. I love everything I have read about it. But I also need a practical environment where this is possible. I would love to be able to do minimal (frugal?) development work on a pi running Plan 9, but the lack of a browser, an editor that feels familiar (at least for a while, until I learn the ropes) and the languages I want to tinker with, it is very hard to get going.
glangdale 5y ago
This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises". They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no advanced auto-completion of program names and flags, like hipster zsh and fish users might be accustomed to. But this really isn't an issue since Plan 9 has virtually no programs or flags to speak of, as you will discover soon enough." Those with any kind of spidey sense for going down tech rabbit holes might also notice how front-and-center features for, ummn, connecting/emulating computers not running Plan 9 are in this guide. Randomly cutting into the document presents you with a plethora of the usual fetishization of the fact that a nearly useless operating system, window manager, etc. doesn't take nearly as many LoC as something that more than a handful of people use, not to mention a giant list of things that you apparently shouldn't do, like use files made in Office: "There are a great many office suits (sic) on most operating systems, and other office utilities besides too numerous to count. So many are the choices in fact that it's easy to forget that "office" is just a fancy word for working with text." It seems to close on some daft explication of how everything can be a database and how you don't need a real one, presumably after having invested thousands of words on how you don't need a spreadsheet, don't need a web browser, don't need an office suite, etc. I cannot think of anything that captures the spirit of Plan 9 less than attempting to revive a dead, nearly 30 year old operating system and pretend that it's a useful daily driver. At the time Plan 9 was built it was a quirky and clean take on technology of the time, built on cutting edge and interesting hardware. At a time when distributed systems in Unix (not really Linux, then) were a tooth-grinding exercise in frozen NFS mounts and awkward, irritating incompatibilities, Plan 9 was a breath of fresh air. Honoring its spirit would be building a new operating system that applies this kind of simplicity to modern hardware (a hell of a task) - and learns from its mistakes, not trying to set up a homestead in this utter wreck.
- itomato 5y ago
  Yeah, but they have Glenda.
- butterisgood 5y ago
butterisgood 5y ago
Been using 9front on a Raspberry pi for many months as my primary coding environment. Thinking about getting a better workstation for it, but so far, there's no real problem using a raspberry pi. (and you just don't need a ton of resources to make it work really well!) This article is great and has very few errors. I won't point any out as they'd just be some old curmudgeonly person pointing out historical inaccuracies that don't really matter that much to a "here's how you can use Plan 9/9front". Really nice! I've been particularly excited about Plan 9 and 9front since the MIT licensing that happened this year. Great outcome, and I wish it'd have happened 10 years sooner!
Koshkin 5y ago
Here is another informative post on Oberon, Plan 9, and Inferno: https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76-oberon-plan-9-inferno/ https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76... (Much of the Plan 9 UI was borrowed from Oberon.) http://www.projectoberon.com/ http://www.projectoberon.com/
- MisterTea 5y ago
  > (Much of the Plan 9 UI was borrowed from Oberon.) The Acme UI is heavily based on Oberon. The current plan 9 UI is Rio, a window multiplexer and manager.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I really wish this would have become a major force. It has a lot of great architecture that would make it a preferred platform in these "cloud", "distributed" ways. Smack Erlang and Elxir on it and you got something.
- butterisgood 5y ago
  Someone's working on Zig, but I'm not sure how much time they have. Also, if I had more time, I'd get Zig working on it too. There's always Go, and it works pretty well too!
genpfault 5y ago
So what's the Plan 9 filesystem interface for GPUs and/or 3D acceleration?
- MisterTea 5y ago
  None. Send patches. Though, there are ideas floating around and supposedly someone working on something but its vaporware as of now. A plan 9 interface to a GPU would have to be as general as possible by excluding API specific interfaces. This way you have a GPGPU interface which you build applications/api's on top of. edit: Here's a very back of napkin idea that was lightly discussed recently, https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=162965057312200&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=162965057312200&w=2
iszomer 5y ago
SDF recently started hosting a Plan 9 bootcamp. https://sdf.org/plan9 https://sdf.org/plan9
- georgeoliver 5y ago
  Love this idea! Plan9 wants a network Plan9 wants to be distributed Plan9 wants a community I've always heard about Plan9's networking, does this include having good leverage for tasks like audio streaming?
  - butterisgood 5y ago
    People were just streaming to twitch from 9front not very long ago (within the last month). So I assume so.
smhenderson 5y ago
As with a lot of people here, one of my first thoughts was, "yes, but how do I browse the web?". So after reading a bit, then skimming and skipping a bit, I found the section on mothra and abaco. By far my favorite line in the article is: Recently, NetSurf has been ported to Plan 9 by the 9front developers. The browser is slow and glitchy with a ton of bugs, and thus provides a fairly convincing web 2.0 experience. Based on this alone I think I shall give Plan 9 another try in the not too distant future!
- anthk 5y ago
  Or better, skip the web completely and read HN over gopher: gopher://hngopher.com HN works under Links, so it could work under Mothra.
  - RealStickman_ 5y ago
    Gopher =/= the web
- sneeeeeed 5y ago
  Oh wow this is great!
codedokode 5y ago
Here is what I thought after reading an article: Linux should provide an API for drivers. So that the drivers can be reused by other OS like FreeBSD or Plan9. If you are making a new OS, it is prohibitively expensive to reinvent the USB stack, write your own ACPI interpreter or port millions of lines of code. There should be an API, otherwise these drivers don't differ much from proprietary drivers. Other OS like Windows, Android or MacOS implement such an API. Therefore it is possible. I think that truly open source drivers should be available for everyone, not only to the users of one specific kernel.
- coliveira 5y ago
  I also wonder why other OSs don't implement a Linux binary interface for drivers, so they can reuse at least some Linux drivers.
  - remexre 5y ago
    I think the answer to both of these is that the Linux driver interface on Linux changes over time!
    - coliveira 5y ago
      Sure, but even in this case it is better to change an interface and be able to benefit from all the drivers written for Linux.
- kryptiskt 5y ago
  There already is an example of such an API, it's possible to use NetBSD drivers outside the NetBSD kernel with its rump kernel feature: https://research.csiro.au/tsblog/using-rump-kernels-to-run-unmodified-netbsd-drivers-on-sel4/ https://research.csiro.au/tsblog/using-rump-kernels-to-run-u...
- ori_b 5y ago
  The millions of lines of code aren't inherent to the problem. Here's the 9front ACPI interpreter: http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/libaml/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/lib... And the USB stack, user and kernel side: http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/cmd/nusb/lib/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/cmd... http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/port/devusb.c/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p... http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/port/usbxhci.c/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p... Even the complex drivers, like wifi, are relatively small: http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/pc/etheriwl.c/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p... Linux code is unpleasant. I don't want to deal with it. Give me clear, well-written docs instead. Of course, since that never happens, we just end up reading the linux code and reimplementing it in a way that's acceptably clean.

238 points by signa11 5y ago

There is just something about these 'old' Operating Systems that takes me back to my super geeky youth :) Sitting in my bedroom with my 386 and trying to install Linux from stiffies and getting IPChains to dnsmasq/forward basically share the dial up connection for 'the house' lol the other 386 ! #GoodTimes :)

hulitu 5y ago

So it is or it is not possible to run X11 on Plan 9 ? The article says that it runs twm and then later that it is possible to run linux program through an emulation layer.

nrr 5y ago
It's complicated. The port of X11 that the article talks about is the one that's on the old Bell Labs web site[0], and it never really worked all that well for me. Linuxemu is something of a research project, and I don't recall it working all that well either. You can get a Unix-alike (e.g., OpenBSD) running under 9front's vmx(1), and that will get you access to X11, albeit not running natively atop a Plan 9 kernel, which is likely not what you're after. 0: http://9p.io/plan9/addons.html http://9p.io/plan9/addons.html
butterisgood 5y ago
More than 10 years ago I ran one by fgb named "equis". Only reference I can find quickly is here https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/x11_installation/index.html https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/x11_installation/index.html I used it with the linux emulation layer someone was building to run Mozilla on Plan 9, but none of those were continued as far as I know.

pjmlp 5y ago

A Plan 9 site that actually talks about Inferno as well, there is some hope after all.

rcarmo 5y ago
I've actually found Inferno a lot more interesting than Plan 9. Dis is very, very neat, and I sort of wish we had modern runtimes for it.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Same here, another similar endveour around the time was the Amiga reboot attempt as TAO, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-12-red-vs-blue/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami... https://www.eetimes.com/amiga-reborn-via-tao-alliance/ https://www.eetimes.com/amiga-reborn-via-tao-alliance/
  - ghostDancer 5y ago
    First time about TAO, was in EDGE magazine in the early 90s IIRC about their OS TAOS sounded something from the future , could run on different processor even over a network, they had it running on a machine using transputers. It looked like sci-fi to me.
- patrec 5y ago
  What do you see as significant advantages of Dis over WASM? [edit: my guess would be channel support, but it would be interesting to hear more about that]
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    Its not so much dis but the whole concept of an OS built on top of a VM. This means the entirety of user space is portable across platforms. There is no way to run native code. It is possible to port wasm to inferno and replace dis. That could open up some interesting possibilities. You could write code in any language, spit out wasm and run it on any cpu/OS via inferno.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Welcome to Burroughs (nowadays ClearPath MCP), Xerox PARC workstations, UCSD Pascal, Lilith, Oberon, IBM i and z/OS, and a couple more. J2ME, Windows Phone 7, watchOS and Android are arguably the closest to it in mainstream computing.

rcarmo 5y ago

This is by far the most comprehensive Plan 9 walkthrough I've read in the past couple of years. I've been running a Raspberry Pi as an all-in-one Plan 9 setup for a long while now (as a sort of catch-all minimalist dev environment/console), and the two main showstoppers for me have been: - The reliance on a three button mouse, which makes it impossible to use Plan 9 on a modern laptop without finagling with modifier keys (no, I don't want to go back to using a mouse, thanks). - The utter lack of any minimally usable browser (I know, the browser would be larger than the OS, but it is a major issue for any kind of work today). It is an excellent system to dig into and learn from, but there are many paper cuts when using it daily: SSH/terminals work differently, VNC/Remote Desktop clients are... weird, etc. (rd sort of works, and sort of doesn't, and without it really working I can't even read documentation online unless it's plaintext). All in all, this is a great thing to see as I hope new things are built atop Plan 9 (when it makes sense), but as a minimal desktop environment I've moved to Openbox + xterm + Firefox, and have been pondering setting up Chromium OS on a beefier Raspberry Pi, since most "consoles" are just web-based these days anyway...

Kototama 5y ago
It's probably unfair to compare Plan9 to "modern" operating systems. Why not talk about everything it got right and smart instead of all the things which behave differently than what our expectations set?
- rcarmo 5y ago
  I'm just pointing out the shortcomings I found. I've been using it and keeping tabs on resources for Plan 9 and Inferno since 2014: - https://taoofmac.com/space/os/plan9 https://taoofmac.com/space/os/plan9 ...so I do know a lot about it in practice. It's just that, also in practice, nearly ten years of tinkering with it have been mesmerising, mostly fun, but not useful enough for my particular use cases. YMMV.
- gonzus 5y ago
  I want to answer trying to interpret the GP. For me, I want to be able to tinker with Plan 9. I love everything I have read about it. But I also need a practical environment where this is possible. I would love to be able to do minimal (frugal?) development work on a pi running Plan 9, but the lack of a browser, an editor that feels familiar (at least for a while, until I learn the ropes) and the languages I want to tinker with, it is very hard to get going.

glangdale 5y ago

This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises". They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no advanced auto-completion of program names and flags, like hipster zsh and fish users might be accustomed to. But this really isn't an issue since Plan 9 has virtually no programs or flags to speak of, as you will discover soon enough." Those with any kind of spidey sense for going down tech rabbit holes might also notice how front-and-center features for, ummn, connecting/emulating computers not running Plan 9 are in this guide. Randomly cutting into the document presents you with a plethora of the usual fetishization of the fact that a nearly useless operating system, window manager, etc. doesn't take nearly as many LoC as something that more than a handful of people use, not to mention a giant list of things that you apparently shouldn't do, like use files made in Office: "There are a great many office suits (sic) on most operating systems, and other office utilities besides too numerous to count. So many are the choices in fact that it's easy to forget that "office" is just a fancy word for working with text." It seems to close on some daft explication of how everything can be a database and how you don't need a real one, presumably after having invested thousands of words on how you don't need a spreadsheet, don't need a web browser, don't need an office suite, etc. I cannot think of anything that captures the spirit of Plan 9 less than attempting to revive a dead, nearly 30 year old operating system and pretend that it's a useful daily driver. At the time Plan 9 was built it was a quirky and clean take on technology of the time, built on cutting edge and interesting hardware. At a time when distributed systems in Unix (not really Linux, then) were a tooth-grinding exercise in frozen NFS mounts and awkward, irritating incompatibilities, Plan 9 was a breath of fresh air. Honoring its spirit would be building a new operating system that applies this kind of simplicity to modern hardware (a hell of a task) - and learns from its mistakes, not trying to set up a homestead in this utter wreck.

itomato 5y ago
Yeah, but they have Glenda.
butterisgood 5y ago

butterisgood 5y ago

Been using 9front on a Raspberry pi for many months as my primary coding environment. Thinking about getting a better workstation for it, but so far, there's no real problem using a raspberry pi. (and you just don't need a ton of resources to make it work really well!) This article is great and has very few errors. I won't point any out as they'd just be some old curmudgeonly person pointing out historical inaccuracies that don't really matter that much to a "here's how you can use Plan 9/9front". Really nice! I've been particularly excited about Plan 9 and 9front since the MIT licensing that happened this year. Great outcome, and I wish it'd have happened 10 years sooner!

Koshkin 5y ago

Here is another informative post on Oberon, Plan 9, and Inferno: https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76-oberon-plan-9-inferno/ https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76... (Much of the Plan 9 UI was borrowed from Oberon.) http://www.projectoberon.com/ http://www.projectoberon.com/

MisterTea 5y ago
> (Much of the Plan 9 UI was borrowed from Oberon.) The Acme UI is heavily based on Oberon. The current plan 9 UI is Rio, a window multiplexer and manager.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I really wish this would have become a major force. It has a lot of great architecture that would make it a preferred platform in these "cloud", "distributed" ways. Smack Erlang and Elxir on it and you got something.

butterisgood 5y ago
Someone's working on Zig, but I'm not sure how much time they have. Also, if I had more time, I'd get Zig working on it too. There's always Go, and it works pretty well too!

genpfault 5y ago

So what's the Plan 9 filesystem interface for GPUs and/or 3D acceleration?

MisterTea 5y ago
None. Send patches. Though, there are ideas floating around and supposedly someone working on something but its vaporware as of now. A plan 9 interface to a GPU would have to be as general as possible by excluding API specific interfaces. This way you have a GPGPU interface which you build applications/api's on top of. edit: Here's a very back of napkin idea that was lightly discussed recently, https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=162965057312200&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=162965057312200&w=2

iszomer 5y ago

SDF recently started hosting a Plan 9 bootcamp. https://sdf.org/plan9 https://sdf.org/plan9

georgeoliver 5y ago
Love this idea! Plan9 wants a network Plan9 wants to be distributed Plan9 wants a community I've always heard about Plan9's networking, does this include having good leverage for tasks like audio streaming?
- butterisgood 5y ago
  People were just streaming to twitch from 9front not very long ago (within the last month). So I assume so.

smhenderson 5y ago

As with a lot of people here, one of my first thoughts was, "yes, but how do I browse the web?". So after reading a bit, then skimming and skipping a bit, I found the section on mothra and abaco. By far my favorite line in the article is: Recently, NetSurf has been ported to Plan 9 by the 9front developers. The browser is slow and glitchy with a ton of bugs, and thus provides a fairly convincing web 2.0 experience. Based on this alone I think I shall give Plan 9 another try in the not too distant future!

anthk 5y ago
Or better, skip the web completely and read HN over gopher: gopher://hngopher.com HN works under Links, so it could work under Mothra.
- RealStickman_ 5y ago
  Gopher =/= the web
sneeeeeed 5y ago
Oh wow this is great!

codedokode 5y ago

Here is what I thought after reading an article: Linux should provide an API for drivers. So that the drivers can be reused by other OS like FreeBSD or Plan9. If you are making a new OS, it is prohibitively expensive to reinvent the USB stack, write your own ACPI interpreter or port millions of lines of code. There should be an API, otherwise these drivers don't differ much from proprietary drivers. Other OS like Windows, Android or MacOS implement such an API. Therefore it is possible. I think that truly open source drivers should be available for everyone, not only to the users of one specific kernel.

coliveira 5y ago
I also wonder why other OSs don't implement a Linux binary interface for drivers, so they can reuse at least some Linux drivers.
- remexre 5y ago
  I think the answer to both of these is that the Linux driver interface on Linux changes over time!
  - coliveira 5y ago
    Sure, but even in this case it is better to change an interface and be able to benefit from all the drivers written for Linux.
kryptiskt 5y ago
There already is an example of such an API, it's possible to use NetBSD drivers outside the NetBSD kernel with its rump kernel feature: https://research.csiro.au/tsblog/using-rump-kernels-to-run-unmodified-netbsd-drivers-on-sel4/ https://research.csiro.au/tsblog/using-rump-kernels-to-run-u...
ori_b 5y ago
The millions of lines of code aren't inherent to the problem. Here's the 9front ACPI interpreter: http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/libaml/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/lib... And the USB stack, user and kernel side: http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/cmd/nusb/lib/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/cmd... http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/port/devusb.c/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p... http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/port/usbxhci.c/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p... Even the complex drivers, like wifi, are relatively small: http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/pc/etheriwl.c/f.html http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p... Linux code is unpleasant. I don't want to deal with it. Give me clear, well-written docs instead. Of course, since that never happens, we just end up reading the linux code and reimplementing it in a way that's acceptably clean.