4 ms·

What is it? Some hobby operating system or what?

wwalexander 2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs > Unofficial development for the system also continues on the 9front fork, where active contributors provide monthly builds and new functionality. So far, the 9front fork has provided the system Wi-Fi drivers, audio drivers, USB support and built-in game emulator, along with other features.
- MisterTea 2mo ago
  To be fair drivers for all that existed already but support was very very narrow in terms of variety. e.g. there was wifi support for like one or two cards but handled on a per card basis - kinda hacky. 9front now has a clean portable wifi interface that spans all the architectures so the Pi and PC have the same wifi infrastructure despite having different interfaces and chips. Same with PCI, it was refactored to be portable among all supported platforms, e.g. the Pi 4 and PC.
ricardobeat 2mo ago
I like this section included in the release PDF: 0.1.3 − Is Plan 9 a cult run by scam artists? From a newcomer's perspective, it feels like dealing with a cult run by scam artists. It seems someone wants to profit from me by selling books on Amazon, like a multi-level marketing group. People say others here are on a spectrum, but it feels more like psychosis, with a loss of contact with reality. I really feel like I'm being gaslighted. I might seem like a troll, but you don't understand how you appear to others.
BSDobelix 2mo ago
Why not research it yourself instead of asking others? Am I the only one who thinks this is becoming increasingly common?
- Suzuran 2mo ago
  "We" don't research it ourselves because we are increasingly taught that we are either too stupid to conduct our own research or not qualified to understand the results, and we must rely on someone else who represents a position of authority. Preferably politicians/influencers/marketing departments/AI models/etc. which can then direct us to make purchasing decisions of benefit to our masters.
  - perching_aix 2mo ago
    Society is hierarchical, and there are people who are closer to various fires, and thus do have more authoritative insight, than others. I don't see merit to discounting this, even though cheap deflections to authority do bother me too.
    - Suzuran 2mo ago
      The problem is not that society is hierarchical, the problem is that position in the hierarchy rarely maps to expertise or trustworthiness. Instead it usually maps to whoever is best at exploiting and then destroying others to raise their position in the hierarchy. Edit for clarity: The biggest part of the "You're too stupid..." thing I mentioned is that we are being led to believe we can't even determine who is and isn't credible in any given field, so we must solicit claimed authority and then blindly obey whoever shows up first. Sometimes this solicitation is in the form of a post, but increasingly it's an AI-generated "web" search response where the index/training data has been torqued to direct people toward economic outcomes desired by the AI/search engine's owners.
- Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
  No, this kind of comment and the "I misread it as xyz" / "I thought this was about abc" comments are getting really annoying. 1. Search engines, LLMs and the homepages of these sites are right there 2. Why would you announce your first thoughts to the world instead of actually engage with what was posted in the right context?
- drcongo 2mo ago
ladax72707 2mo ago
lol
lproven 2mo ago
9front is the community fork of the OS that the creators of UNIX and C did next. This is what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did to fix the faults in the Unix design. Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and all the other FOSS Unix-like OSes are community recreations of the flawed AT&T Unix. 9front is the continuation of the OS that came next.
- MisterTea 2mo ago
  Plan 9 is mostly Rob Pikes idea and did not involve Ritchie heavily. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 Recently, Pike commented that he designed Plan 9 so he could build the windowing system he wanted. (edit: oops, link) https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T4fec171fec7e3845-M2aa08b2665722b7fb587bb13/principia-softwarica-fourth-book-on-the-windowing-system-rio https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T4fec171fec7e3845-M2...
  - pram 2mo ago
    That XTerm readme is pretty funny "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here"
    - scoot 2mo ago
      It's a quote from Dante's Inferno
  - lproven 2mo ago
    I knew this about Pike, but not Ritchie. Thanks. I think, though, that one of the vastly underestimated aspects of Plan 9/9front is its simplified C. AIUI one of the biggest differences is that a file is not allowed to `#include` anything that has already been #included in a parent project. You are not allowed to nest #includes. The result is vastly reduced compile times. I have read claims of over 1000x fewer lines of code going through the compiler. (Sure, disk caching helps a lot, but it still has to go through CPU.) Cleaning up a codebase is a massive PITA but it's a one-time job and I have read comments that once you learn this, it quickly becomes habit. Imagine if that was put into C29 as an advisory. Decades and centuries of compute-time saved. This is standard in Go, which is of course Pike's more recent baby. ANSI C let you get away with this, which sounds like one of the more epic mistakes: https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_5 https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_5.
xelxebar 2mo ago
I daily drive 9front. The historical emergence answers here are fine as far as they go, but they're a bit like saying that Linux is an OS developed by Linus to help him learn x86. IMO 9front is an exposé of what an OS can look like when it's written for and by hackers with a focus on simplicity. The YouTube channel adventuresin9[0] parades some nice examples of what real world usage looks like. For example, since everything is just a file, you tunnel traffic with a simple bind mount. Since everything is just text, small regexes suffice to route mouse clicks to UI actions. Since windows are just buffers, grepping history is grepping the window's text buffer; taking a screenshot is just cp-ing the window's draw buffer. Oh, and 9front C diverges from the standard intentionally in some nice ways: evaluation of function args is sequenced, anonymous unions like struct { int a; union { uint i; int j; }; } do what you want, the libc is a lot leaner and cleaner, etc. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- wahern 2mo ago
  C99 added designated initializers and compound literals, and C11 added anonymous structs and unions of the kind you showed above. These are 3 of the biggest features Plan 9 added to C, and they were adopted relatively quickly. But there's another type of anonymous struct/union Plan 9 added; using a bare tag name, e.g. `struct foo { union bar; };` to implicitly define the members. And Plan 9 C will also automagically coerce (and adjust the pointer offset) a struct reference to a reference to a typed anonymous member when calling a function that takes the latter. And now that I think about it, this seems like the obvious predecessor to Go's duck typing.
  - asveikau 2mo ago
    GCC and VC++ supported anonymous structs and unions long before C11.
nailer 2mo ago
It seems unnecessary to vote this down. I'm familiar with Plan9, but it wasn't obvious from the front page: > 9FRONT.ORG THE PLAN FELL OFF that this had anything to do with the post-Unix OS. It looks more like a chan site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs > Unofficial development for the system also continues on the 9front fork, where active contributors provide monthly builds and new functionality. So far, the 9front fork has provided the system Wi-Fi drivers, audio drivers, USB support and built-in game emulator, along with other features.

MisterTea 2mo ago
To be fair drivers for all that existed already but support was very very narrow in terms of variety. e.g. there was wifi support for like one or two cards but handled on a per card basis - kinda hacky. 9front now has a clean portable wifi interface that spans all the architectures so the Pi and PC have the same wifi infrastructure despite having different interfaces and chips. Same with PCI, it was refactored to be portable among all supported platforms, e.g. the Pi 4 and PC.

ricardobeat 2mo ago

I like this section included in the release PDF: 0.1.3 − Is Plan 9 a cult run by scam artists? From a newcomer's perspective, it feels like dealing with a cult run by scam artists. It seems someone wants to profit from me by selling books on Amazon, like a multi-level marketing group. People say others here are on a spectrum, but it feels more like psychosis, with a loss of contact with reality. I really feel like I'm being gaslighted. I might seem like a troll, but you don't understand how you appear to others.

BSDobelix 2mo ago

Why not research it yourself instead of asking others? Am I the only one who thinks this is becoming increasingly common?

Suzuran 2mo ago
"We" don't research it ourselves because we are increasingly taught that we are either too stupid to conduct our own research or not qualified to understand the results, and we must rely on someone else who represents a position of authority. Preferably politicians/influencers/marketing departments/AI models/etc. which can then direct us to make purchasing decisions of benefit to our masters.
- perching_aix 2mo ago
  Society is hierarchical, and there are people who are closer to various fires, and thus do have more authoritative insight, than others. I don't see merit to discounting this, even though cheap deflections to authority do bother me too.
  - Suzuran 2mo ago
    The problem is not that society is hierarchical, the problem is that position in the hierarchy rarely maps to expertise or trustworthiness. Instead it usually maps to whoever is best at exploiting and then destroying others to raise their position in the hierarchy. Edit for clarity: The biggest part of the "You're too stupid..." thing I mentioned is that we are being led to believe we can't even determine who is and isn't credible in any given field, so we must solicit claimed authority and then blindly obey whoever shows up first. Sometimes this solicitation is in the form of a post, but increasingly it's an AI-generated "web" search response where the index/training data has been torqued to direct people toward economic outcomes desired by the AI/search engine's owners.
Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
No, this kind of comment and the "I misread it as xyz" / "I thought this was about abc" comments are getting really annoying. 1. Search engines, LLMs and the homepages of these sites are right there 2. Why would you announce your first thoughts to the world instead of actually engage with what was posted in the right context?
drcongo 2mo ago

ladax72707 2mo ago

lol

lproven 2mo ago

9front is the community fork of the OS that the creators of UNIX and C did next. This is what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did to fix the faults in the Unix design. Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and all the other FOSS Unix-like OSes are community recreations of the flawed AT&T Unix. 9front is the continuation of the OS that came next.

MisterTea 2mo ago
Plan 9 is mostly Rob Pikes idea and did not involve Ritchie heavily. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 Recently, Pike commented that he designed Plan 9 so he could build the windowing system he wanted. (edit: oops, link) https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T4fec171fec7e3845-M2aa08b2665722b7fb587bb13/principia-softwarica-fourth-book-on-the-windowing-system-rio https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T4fec171fec7e3845-M2...
- pram 2mo ago
  That XTerm readme is pretty funny "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here"
  - scoot 2mo ago
    It's a quote from Dante's Inferno
- lproven 2mo ago
  I knew this about Pike, but not Ritchie. Thanks. I think, though, that one of the vastly underestimated aspects of Plan 9/9front is its simplified C. AIUI one of the biggest differences is that a file is not allowed to `#include` anything that has already been #included in a parent project. You are not allowed to nest #includes. The result is vastly reduced compile times. I have read claims of over 1000x fewer lines of code going through the compiler. (Sure, disk caching helps a lot, but it still has to go through CPU.) Cleaning up a codebase is a massive PITA but it's a one-time job and I have read comments that once you learn this, it quickly becomes habit. Imagine if that was put into C29 as an advisory. Decades and centuries of compute-time saved. This is standard in Go, which is of course Pike's more recent baby. ANSI C let you get away with this, which sounds like one of the more epic mistakes: https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_5 https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_5.

xelxebar 2mo ago

I daily drive 9front. The historical emergence answers here are fine as far as they go, but they're a bit like saying that Linux is an OS developed by Linus to help him learn x86. IMO 9front is an exposé of what an OS can look like when it's written for and by hackers with a focus on simplicity. The YouTube channel adventuresin9[0] parades some nice examples of what real world usage looks like. For example, since everything is just a file, you tunnel traffic with a simple bind mount. Since everything is just text, small regexes suffice to route mouse clicks to UI actions. Since windows are just buffers, grepping history is grepping the window's text buffer; taking a screenshot is just cp-ing the window's draw buffer. Oh, and 9front C diverges from the standard intentionally in some nice ways: evaluation of function args is sequenced, anonymous unions like struct { int a; union { uint i; int j; }; } do what you want, the libc is a lot leaner and cleaner, etc. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
wahern 2mo ago
C99 added designated initializers and compound literals, and C11 added anonymous structs and unions of the kind you showed above. These are 3 of the biggest features Plan 9 added to C, and they were adopted relatively quickly. But there's another type of anonymous struct/union Plan 9 added; using a bare tag name, e.g. `struct foo { union bar; };` to implicitly define the members. And Plan 9 C will also automagically coerce (and adjust the pointer offset) a struct reference to a reference to a typed anonymous member when calling a function that takes the latter. And now that I think about it, this seems like the obvious predecessor to Go's duck typing.
- asveikau 2mo ago
  GCC and VC++ supported anonymous structs and unions long before C11.

nailer 2mo ago

It seems unnecessary to vote this down. I'm familiar with Plan9, but it wasn't obvious from the front page: > 9FRONT.ORG THE PLAN FELL OFF that this had anything to do with the post-Unix OS. It looks more like a chan site.