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Plan 9 was interesting for me because I was just at the point of deciding "maybe everything being a file is a mistake". Then I learned about plan 9 and it blew

Plan 9 was interesting for me because I was just at the point of deciding "maybe everything being a file is a mistake". Then I learned about plan 9 and it blew my mind. Really a very neat system.

tombert 8mo ago
I’ve been playing with it on an old laptop. It took me a bit to “get it”, but once the “everything exposes filesystems” thing clicked in my brain, I grew to really like it. I would love to try daily driving 9Front but the lack of a modern browser and video acceleration is a pretty hard blocker. I still would like to make a server with it though. Maybe that would be a good weekend project.
nxobject 8mo ago
It's not the most complete lens, but I've always also thought of it as "lots of servers advertising services through a centralized directory" (e.g. like NT's Object Manager). But, I don't think the Plan 9 team ever figured out how to elegantly implement security/isolation-related primitives like secret storage with a single general mechanism. Their "canonical" way of providing secure authentication relies on a few ad-hoc capability mechanisms, built on top of 9P deeply integrated with some special-purpose kernel features. [1] If Bell Labs had more time, I think they would've ended up rethinking 9P around this issue. [1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2013/readings/plan9auth.pdf https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2013/readings/plan9auth.pdf
pjmlp 8mo ago
It is, that is why it doesn't have any proper graphics or video acceleration. Treating GPUs as files isn't something that tends to win performance benchmarks.
- sroerick 8mo ago
  So, hypothetically, if P9 had won, would it be better? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be a perfectly capable interface. Is there a technical limitation here? I don't know much about graphics, but having tried to get graphics drivers working on Linux for a couple decades, it seems like you're missing some context about proprietary interfaces here

Plan 9 was interesting for me because I was just at the point of deciding "maybe everything being a file is a mistake". Then I learned about plan 9 and it blew my mind. Really a very neat system.

tombert 8mo ago

I’ve been playing with it on an old laptop. It took me a bit to “get it”, but once the “everything exposes filesystems” thing clicked in my brain, I grew to really like it. I would love to try daily driving 9Front but the lack of a modern browser and video acceleration is a pretty hard blocker. I still would like to make a server with it though. Maybe that would be a good weekend project.

nxobject 8mo ago

It's not the most complete lens, but I've always also thought of it as "lots of servers advertising services through a centralized directory" (e.g. like NT's Object Manager). But, I don't think the Plan 9 team ever figured out how to elegantly implement security/isolation-related primitives like secret storage with a single general mechanism. Their "canonical" way of providing secure authentication relies on a few ad-hoc capability mechanisms, built on top of 9P deeply integrated with some special-purpose kernel features. [1] If Bell Labs had more time, I think they would've ended up rethinking 9P around this issue. [1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2013/readings/plan9auth.pdf https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2013/readings/plan9auth.pdf

pjmlp 8mo ago

It is, that is why it doesn't have any proper graphics or video acceleration. Treating GPUs as files isn't something that tends to win performance benchmarks.

sroerick 8mo ago
So, hypothetically, if P9 had won, would it be better? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be a perfectly capable interface. Is there a technical limitation here? I don't know much about graphics, but having tried to get graphics drivers working on Linux for a couple decades, it seems like you're missing some context about proprietary interfaces here