4 ms·

My understanding of Plan 9 is that the primary benefits it brought are in its ability to make a large collection of computers look like one unified system. So r

My understanding of Plan 9 is that the primary benefits it brought are in its ability to make a large collection of computers look like one unified system. So rather than asking what would it look like if Android was based on Plan 9, I'd think of it as: what would it look like if my laptop, TV, and smartphone all ran Plan 9. I think then you'd have a scenario in which, for example, you can pick up your phone and tell your TV to start streaming some file you have on your laptop. You can probably do this now using some collection of complicated programs that you have to install, but with Plan 9 it would be easy since everything appeared to be just one part of a larger computing system. Or another example: you're working at your office with a desktop computer running Plan 9. Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go. So that's how things would be different I think. Not revolutionary, but definitely an improvement on what we have now. (Note: I'm not a Plan 9 expert and have never actually used it, however, I do find the ideas from it interesting and have read a bit about it, so I think the above is fairly accurate).

Swizec 12y ago
> Or another example: you're working at your office with a desktop computer running Plan 9. Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go. So basically an IP nightmare for many companies?
- forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
  No more a nightmare than someone bringing in a flash drive and copying the file to it before they left. You'd only have access to things you already had access to.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    My girlfriend can't even access her work email unless she uses a company sanctioned laptop. Sure that's just because she doesn't know how to set up VPN access on her own, but still.
    - forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
      Right, but there are still access control settings in Plan9 that would be able to limit access if the administrator chose to do so, there is just more flexibility to what can be done by default.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      I just got into a mess where the company VPN uses a windows/mac specific client, no linux version and no way to access the VPN. So knowing how to set up VPN access 'on my own' is currently of no use to me.
    - Someone 12y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure. Allowing employees to move arbitrary hardware running arbitrary software into their VPN is a security risk many companies do not want to take. That is why it took pressure to get iPhones into enterprise networks.
- jeffreyrogers 12y ago
  It was mostly an example. And it's relatively to avoid the IP issues. Just don't let employees personal computers be part of the corporate Plan 9 system.
- Renaud 12y ago
  But that's already the case if you company uses Google Docs or Office365. If a company is intent on constraining access to data from its office space only, then it wouldn't select or open itself to such systems.
sampo 12y ago
> Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go. I do this all the time, Gnome file manager (Nautilus) mounts my work computer over sftp with three mouse clicks (Connect to Server / select server / Connect). Granted, I can only work on the remote files in Nautilus, and with GUI programs than I launch by right-clicking on the files in Nautilus. If I want a command line, I need to do some other, but also simple, tricks.
- rakoo 12y ago
  Plan 9 goes far beyond than that. Everything can be shared automatically, because everything is a file. Here are some scenarios that should be possible: - You can access files remotely automatically from any application (akin to what sshfs does) - You can access non-files remotely automatically: a printer is just a fd you write to - A GPU from a distant cluster is just a resource you can use as if it were local (I'm speaking of implementation, not performance). - A mail service can be accessed on a mail server, which is itself not connected to the wild internet but goes through a firewall... itself accessible through the same file protocol. Oh and the mail you want to send sits in your outbox on your phone, so you just grab it from your computer. - You can play the music that lives on your machine on the speakers anywhere in your house by communicating with the remote fd - One of the dream of Rob Pike (co-inventor) is that you wouldn't need a multi-core machine in your pocket for your mobile lives, you'd only need a good connection so you can access all resources on any server that is connected to the network. Your "smartphone" would then just be a terminal to pilot all your resources. All of this accessible with the same interface, available in the OS. It may be have been a ludicrous dream, especially when we look at how much data would have been shuffling between machines, but the prospect of such networking still sounds awesome.
  - sampo 12y ago
    So, could we imagine a startup making Internet of Things, and smart homes, and basing their tech on Plan 9 instead of Linux?
MichaelGG 12y ago
That all sounds neat, but how does it work on less than ideal networks? The non trivial jitter and latency would mess up programs that assume things are local. Even things like buffering audio needs to be network aware. If local, low latency can be achieved. If remote, then buffer to avoid skips. I'm a bit suspicious of things that make network access transparent.
- _3u10 12y ago
  Yup, as anyone who has ever run a program that accesses files over NFS knows it all sounds very wonderful on paper and absolutely sucks in real life.
- stormbrew 12y ago
  I think the thing people tend to miss in looking at plan9 is that, it being true that the infrastructure it provided doesn't explicitly solve all these last-mile problems people have with network transparency, it does solve several major problems you come to before you can even reason about that. Having a uniform network protocol, a reasonable multi-node security model, and a workable method of uniformly addressing remote resources are the horse, what you do with it is the cart.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  QnX does all this and more and it works quite well. NFS is just a particularly botched implementation of an attempt at network transparency.
- rakoo 12y ago
  Certainly horrible if we were to switch to it now, but if it had caught on, maybe we would have put more money on improving networks instead of improving CPUs. OTOH, Plan 9 was designed as a company-global "machine": you have a room filled with CPU clusters and storage clusters, and your own simple, stupid terminal to manage your resources. But your terminal is only a view; ultimately the data lives in the storage cluster and is processed in the CPU cluster. Take a look at this page, notably the figure 1: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 As you can see, CPU and storage were expected to live on a high-speed, low-latency link because most of the data would fly between those two. Your terminal was expected to be anywhere else, possibly on the other end of a slow ethernet cable, and would coordinate the transmission of data from there. But most of the transmission would be between CPUs and storage. It wasn't supposed to be a truly p2p decentralized model.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

Swizec 12y ago

> Or another example: you're working at your office with a desktop computer running Plan 9. Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go. So basically an IP nightmare for many companies?

forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
No more a nightmare than someone bringing in a flash drive and copying the file to it before they left. You'd only have access to things you already had access to.
- Swizec 12y ago
  My girlfriend can't even access her work email unless she uses a company sanctioned laptop. Sure that's just because she doesn't know how to set up VPN access on her own, but still.
  - forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
    Right, but there are still access control settings in Plan9 that would be able to limit access if the administrator chose to do so, there is just more flexibility to what can be done by default.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I just got into a mess where the company VPN uses a windows/mac specific client, no linux version and no way to access the VPN. So knowing how to set up VPN access 'on my own' is currently of no use to me.
  - Someone 12y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure. Allowing employees to move arbitrary hardware running arbitrary software into their VPN is a security risk many companies do not want to take. That is why it took pressure to get iPhones into enterprise networks.
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
It was mostly an example. And it's relatively to avoid the IP issues. Just don't let employees personal computers be part of the corporate Plan 9 system.
Renaud 12y ago
But that's already the case if you company uses Google Docs or Office365. If a company is intent on constraining access to data from its office space only, then it wouldn't select or open itself to such systems.

sampo 12y ago

> Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go. I do this all the time, Gnome file manager (Nautilus) mounts my work computer over sftp with three mouse clicks (Connect to Server / select server / Connect). Granted, I can only work on the remote files in Nautilus, and with GUI programs than I launch by right-clicking on the files in Nautilus. If I want a command line, I need to do some other, but also simple, tricks.

rakoo 12y ago
Plan 9 goes far beyond than that. Everything can be shared automatically, because everything is a file. Here are some scenarios that should be possible: - You can access files remotely automatically from any application (akin to what sshfs does) - You can access non-files remotely automatically: a printer is just a fd you write to - A GPU from a distant cluster is just a resource you can use as if it were local (I'm speaking of implementation, not performance). - A mail service can be accessed on a mail server, which is itself not connected to the wild internet but goes through a firewall... itself accessible through the same file protocol. Oh and the mail you want to send sits in your outbox on your phone, so you just grab it from your computer. - You can play the music that lives on your machine on the speakers anywhere in your house by communicating with the remote fd - One of the dream of Rob Pike (co-inventor) is that you wouldn't need a multi-core machine in your pocket for your mobile lives, you'd only need a good connection so you can access all resources on any server that is connected to the network. Your "smartphone" would then just be a terminal to pilot all your resources. All of this accessible with the same interface, available in the OS. It may be have been a ludicrous dream, especially when we look at how much data would have been shuffling between machines, but the prospect of such networking still sounds awesome.
- sampo 12y ago
  So, could we imagine a startup making Internet of Things, and smart homes, and basing their tech on Plan 9 instead of Linux?

MichaelGG 12y ago

That all sounds neat, but how does it work on less than ideal networks? The non trivial jitter and latency would mess up programs that assume things are local. Even things like buffering audio needs to be network aware. If local, low latency can be achieved. If remote, then buffer to avoid skips. I'm a bit suspicious of things that make network access transparent.

_3u10 12y ago
Yup, as anyone who has ever run a program that accesses files over NFS knows it all sounds very wonderful on paper and absolutely sucks in real life.
stormbrew 12y ago
I think the thing people tend to miss in looking at plan9 is that, it being true that the infrastructure it provided doesn't explicitly solve all these last-mile problems people have with network transparency, it does solve several major problems you come to before you can even reason about that. Having a uniform network protocol, a reasonable multi-node security model, and a workable method of uniformly addressing remote resources are the horse, what you do with it is the cart.
jacquesm 12y ago
QnX does all this and more and it works quite well. NFS is just a particularly botched implementation of an attempt at network transparency.
rakoo 12y ago
Certainly horrible if we were to switch to it now, but if it had caught on, maybe we would have put more money on improving networks instead of improving CPUs. OTOH, Plan 9 was designed as a company-global "machine": you have a room filled with CPU clusters and storage clusters, and your own simple, stupid terminal to manage your resources. But your terminal is only a view; ultimately the data lives in the storage cluster and is processed in the CPU cluster. Take a look at this page, notably the figure 1: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 As you can see, CPU and storage were expected to live on a high-speed, low-latency link because most of the data would fly between those two. Your terminal was expected to be anywhere else, possibly on the other end of a slow ethernet cable, and would coordinate the transmission of data from there. But most of the transmission would be between CPUs and storage. It wasn't supposed to be a truly p2p decentralized model.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]