9 ms·

It's interesting, but I can't tell from the documentation what it's actually for. It's apparently for clustering, but what does it do? I had downloaded the im

It's interesting, but I can't tell from the documentation what it's actually for. It's apparently for clustering, but what does it do? I had downloaded the image a week or two back, but it just...booted Plan 9. A few examples that tie it together or explain some sort of use case would be great.

mycroftiv 14y ago
Have you seen the tutorials at the ANTS farm subsite? They show a series of things you can do to explore the 9worker and 9queen in combination with live CDs, which show what I believe are new exciting features for Plan 9 that I have tried to add. There is also a full length paper explaining how I have tried to improve the design of Plan 9 and how I use ANTS on my systems.
- mcartyem 14y ago
  Can you say in one sentence what it is that you built that doesn't already exist, and why it is important?
  - evolve2k 14y ago
    There is some interesting historical context here following the history and lessons learnt link in the article. http://www.9gridchan.org/9gridhistlatest.html http://www.9gridchan.org/9gridhistlatest.html Found a little more background via Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs "Plan 9 is a grid computing platform. It is an effort to provide a computing environment for geographically distributed clusters running on heterogeneous hardware, engineered for modern distributed environments and designed from the start to be a networked operating system.[12] It can be installed as a self-contained system and used on a single computer, but also has the capability to separate its components between separate computers. In a typical Plan 9 installation, users work at terminals running rio, and they access CPU servers which handle computation-intensive processes. Permanent data storage is provided by additional network hosts acting as file servers and archival storage.[13] Currently available desktop computers can emulate this architecture internally using multiple virtual machines." Anyone else care to explain the elements which make Plan 9 stuff awesome (in noob terms)?
    - emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
      Plan 9 is "Unix done right." Think of everything everyone loves about Unix, especially its ability to connect components together via pipes and plain text files, and take it to the limit, and you'll get Plan 9. Because everything was a file in Plan 9, tasks that were difficult for Unix were no brainers. Want to redirect your screen from one host to another? No problem, just mount a different framebuffer over the network. Compare that to the X11 monstrosity and its associated specific protocols for remote desktops and screen splitting/sharing and so forth -- in Plan 9, this was just done with mount. Want to place a mixer on the audio path? No problem, the filter exports a filesystem interface, and you just mount it on top of the actual audio file. Different apps write to what they think is /dev/audio, which turns out to be a pipe to the mixer, which then mixes the signals from different apps and writes to the real /dev/audio. Contrast this with the "Poettering-approach" to Pulse Audio: klunky, specialized, complex, and ultimately broken. Plan 9 was small, simple and incredibly powerful. Its /proc filesystem had impact on other OSes, notably Linux, but sadly no existing OS comes anywhere near its clean and elegant aesthetic. There were so many other innovative aspects of Plan 9 (e.g. no superuser, utf-8 for everything, network protocols, the fileserver, the WORM filesystem that retained everything, the editor, the windowing systems, etc) that I cannot hope to be comprehensive, so I picked out its main feature. For the rest, I encourage everyone to read the papers: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/
      - enneff 14y ago
        I have heard Rob Pike describe Plan 9, or at least the kernel, as "The most object-oriented system ever built," (apologies if I paraphrased incorrectly). He was referring to the fact that everything satisfies one simple interface, and so everything can be plugged into almost anything else.
        emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
        Right, everything is a filesystem in Plan 9. It's really elegant. Many people think Unix is elegant, which it is, but then they realize there is a higher plane of elegance in interface design when they encounter Plan 9. In case anyone is wondering how the Plan 9 approach could accommodate special devices and so forth (i.e. objects that do not conform exactly to the same interface), there is an escape hatch called a control file, and you can do the equivalent of an ioctl by writing device-specific commands to the control file. But by and large, P9 represents everything as a filesystem and thus makes it really easy to reconnect the piping any which way the user likes. Every hacker needs to see Plan 9 in action.
  - mycroftiv 14y ago
    Anarchistic rather than hierarchical Plan 9 grid architecture.
    - gcb0 14y ago
      Bittorrent is more anarchist. This seem lawless. Unless I'm missing some sort of peer validation in the code
- 1337p337 14y ago
  Ah, okay. Clicking on the tutorial link and then clicking on the "Overview" link on the site for the tutorial yielded "Creates a new service namespace beneath normal userspace for administration" and "Move between namespaces on demand with rerootwin and other scripts", both of which seem pretty useful. You might want to make a semi-prominent link to the overview.

mycroftiv 14y ago

Have you seen the tutorials at the ANTS farm subsite? They show a series of things you can do to explore the 9worker and 9queen in combination with live CDs, which show what I believe are new exciting features for Plan 9 that I have tried to add. There is also a full length paper explaining how I have tried to improve the design of Plan 9 and how I use ANTS on my systems.

mcartyem 14y ago
Can you say in one sentence what it is that you built that doesn't already exist, and why it is important?
- evolve2k 14y ago
  There is some interesting historical context here following the history and lessons learnt link in the article. http://www.9gridchan.org/9gridhistlatest.html http://www.9gridchan.org/9gridhistlatest.html Found a little more background via Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs "Plan 9 is a grid computing platform. It is an effort to provide a computing environment for geographically distributed clusters running on heterogeneous hardware, engineered for modern distributed environments and designed from the start to be a networked operating system.[12] It can be installed as a self-contained system and used on a single computer, but also has the capability to separate its components between separate computers. In a typical Plan 9 installation, users work at terminals running rio, and they access CPU servers which handle computation-intensive processes. Permanent data storage is provided by additional network hosts acting as file servers and archival storage.[13] Currently available desktop computers can emulate this architecture internally using multiple virtual machines." Anyone else care to explain the elements which make Plan 9 stuff awesome (in noob terms)?
  - emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
    Plan 9 is "Unix done right." Think of everything everyone loves about Unix, especially its ability to connect components together via pipes and plain text files, and take it to the limit, and you'll get Plan 9. Because everything was a file in Plan 9, tasks that were difficult for Unix were no brainers. Want to redirect your screen from one host to another? No problem, just mount a different framebuffer over the network. Compare that to the X11 monstrosity and its associated specific protocols for remote desktops and screen splitting/sharing and so forth -- in Plan 9, this was just done with mount. Want to place a mixer on the audio path? No problem, the filter exports a filesystem interface, and you just mount it on top of the actual audio file. Different apps write to what they think is /dev/audio, which turns out to be a pipe to the mixer, which then mixes the signals from different apps and writes to the real /dev/audio. Contrast this with the "Poettering-approach" to Pulse Audio: klunky, specialized, complex, and ultimately broken. Plan 9 was small, simple and incredibly powerful. Its /proc filesystem had impact on other OSes, notably Linux, but sadly no existing OS comes anywhere near its clean and elegant aesthetic. There were so many other innovative aspects of Plan 9 (e.g. no superuser, utf-8 for everything, network protocols, the fileserver, the WORM filesystem that retained everything, the editor, the windowing systems, etc) that I cannot hope to be comprehensive, so I picked out its main feature. For the rest, I encourage everyone to read the papers: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/
    - enneff 14y ago
      I have heard Rob Pike describe Plan 9, or at least the kernel, as "The most object-oriented system ever built," (apologies if I paraphrased incorrectly). He was referring to the fact that everything satisfies one simple interface, and so everything can be plugged into almost anything else.
      - emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
        Right, everything is a filesystem in Plan 9. It's really elegant. Many people think Unix is elegant, which it is, but then they realize there is a higher plane of elegance in interface design when they encounter Plan 9. In case anyone is wondering how the Plan 9 approach could accommodate special devices and so forth (i.e. objects that do not conform exactly to the same interface), there is an escape hatch called a control file, and you can do the equivalent of an ioctl by writing device-specific commands to the control file. But by and large, P9 represents everything as a filesystem and thus makes it really easy to reconnect the piping any which way the user likes. Every hacker needs to see Plan 9 in action.
- mycroftiv 14y ago
  Anarchistic rather than hierarchical Plan 9 grid architecture.
  - gcb0 14y ago
    Bittorrent is more anarchist. This seem lawless. Unless I'm missing some sort of peer validation in the code
1337p337 14y ago
Ah, okay. Clicking on the tutorial link and then clicking on the "Overview" link on the site for the tutorial yielded "Creates a new service namespace beneath normal userspace for administration" and "Move between namespaces on demand with rerootwin and other scripts", both of which seem pretty useful. You might want to make a semi-prominent link to the overview.