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I've wondered for a while now, why isn't Plan 9 rising along with cloud computing? It seems like it would mesh very well with having many computers connected in
by pi18n 14y ago
I've wondered for a while now, why isn't Plan 9 rising along with cloud computing? It seems like it would mesh very well with having many computers connected in a network, and might make tasks like massively distributed map/reduce more accessible.
- mhd 14y agoWhat part would you be interested in? Pretty much everything that Plan 9 has is available in some kind of fashion for other operating systems, often in a more specialized manner. And by the time you hack the performance and compatibility into Plan 9's kernel and drivers (if its minimalism would allow it), you could port/re-implement most of what you'd be missing. The main part that made this distributed nature possible was 9P, a network protocol/file system. And distributed file systems are a dime a dozen now. Hadoop, S3, GFS, GlusterFS are all vital elements of "the cloud", never mind old staples like NFS, AFS etc. For "cloud needs", they're better suited (fault tolerance, performance…). The big thing about Plan 9 (and Bell Laps software in general) wasn't its novelty, but its scope, narrowing down everything in a typical network environment down to a few protocols, APIs and GUIs. Not really all that applicable for serving bits to browsers. Never mind the bandwidth. Plan 9 was mostly text in a LAN.