Plan9 / 9Front Thread

What was it
How could it be relevant
Was this really the greatest OS ever made

How could its principles be included in systems of 2017?

Other urls found in this thread:

doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/programming/c_programming_in_plan_9
doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/3rd_edition/rio/
fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html#0.1.3
freebsd.org/doc/handbook/
fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html#0.3
fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html
fqa.9front.org/fqa8.html#8.7
doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape
fqa.9front.org/fqa4.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

read that as:
>How could its principles be included in systemd

>extended "everything is a file" to "everything is a file hierarchy", reduces ioctl and socket usage
>extended IPC with shared memory dims the difference between microkernel and monolithic kernel >strengths and weaknesses, "put it where is makes sense" answer
>very little system calls
>C library with sane utf-8
>filesystem based network stack
>way cleaner C network library
but also
>deadOS

The more and more I read up on it the better it sounds. Except...

What CAN it run? I've heard it has absolutely no backwards compatibility with anything.

but also
>ugly mascott
>uses C to begin with

Glenda is fucking adorable

> bashing C for OS programming
are you actually retarded?

C isn't _that_ bad, it's just standard libraries and operating system interfaces are bad.

>Glenda is fucking adorable
shit taste on your side
>but m-muh UNIX-like OSes are created with C
shit taste on your side
It is THAT bad as a language, it could have done better the time it was created, it killed better creations and no, I'm no Lisptard, and its standard libraries and OS interfaces are that bad because of the language.

googles new os might have some plan9 shit in it

intentionally contrarian

Plan 9 doesn't use C retards. Read beyond the Wikipedia article on it. (And not much from cat-v.)

>a language that is literally non-deterministic is acceptable for making OS's in 2017

are you literally retarded?

being so rude while being wrong... why people do this?
Plan 9 uses ANSI C with very distinct standard library. Great portion of user space is written in rc and Limbo/Go (thanks for that).

>Alef is ANSI C
>userpace written in Go which was released in 2009
Yeah, whatever dude.

>ugly mascot

Rewrite Plan9 in D
Implement 9p2000 on all the stupid IoT protocols
??????
Profit

>Alef dropped in 2nd edition and not even big portion of codebase
>ignoring Limbo and rc notices
you are fighting with yourself m8

>Plan9
>How could it be relevant
Figure out what it would add to android or ios.

it's shit lmao
9fags are better than unixfags for realizing unix is shit, but if you're gonna use something that's not backwards compatible with unix then why settle for "barely better than unix" when there's GOOD shit around like genera lisp os
probably because the unix model is all they can think of, I swear unix is the blub OS

>UBs are non-determinism
I-is this what Rust """people""" think?

Alef syntax seems alright, seems like a big influence for Go.

Genera... seriously?

>proprietary
>only runs on certain hardware
>zero compatibility
>no unique or interesting features

>Got its name because people thought "unremarkabla" didn't roll off the tongue.

>How could its principles be included in systems of 2017?
It already is. Linus picked and chosen things he liked and integrated them into Linux. The /proc and /sys hierarchies are just one example. For contrast, the traditional Unix way of doing a kernel interface is syscalls, as can be seen in BSDs.

Change it so "everything is everywhere."

Every "terminal" is the same image as every other.

>Change it so "everything is everywhere."

Isn't that Amoeba?

Probably not. Plan9 was developed because just developing Unix further didn't work. You sometimes need a new beginning.

Unfortunately, Unix works well enough.

Which network library would that be? dial?

Plan9 was just developing Unix further tho

Plan9 is written in an C dialect
doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/programming/c_programming_in_plan_9

rio, the windowing system was originally written in alef, but that's it
doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/3rd_edition/rio/
>Converted (in an afternoon) in 1999 to use the thread library. Historical note: although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C.

>his 9front machine doesn't have 2 months of uptime

I had Plan9 on my Pi for about a year uptime because I forgot I had it plugged in. It wasn't until I did a spring clean that I found it.

Newbie here, what's the point of plan9?

I know this sounds stupid but it doesn't look like you can program on it, you can't video edit on it, you can't write word docs on it, you can't game on it, you can't video chat with coworkers, you can't do anything that might be considered productive, you can't maintain databases and systems and servers through virtual machines on it, you can't do anything that might be considered productive by anyone.

Yet when I hear about it, i hear praises of it's distributed file system and how distributed file systems would change the world.

but....what does that even mean? What benefit does a "distributed file system" offer, that, say, linux or BSD dont? I can already remotely log into people's computers using SSH, I can already run servers....what does plan9 do that benefits a business environment (or a personal environment) that linux doesn't already do?

No, it's a shitty OS. It's dead as a doornail because the incompetent devs think that basic features like error messages or a functional web browser are bloat.
>lol look at me I'm so minimal that I barely exist
There were better operating systems out in the 80s. I don't care if it's a slow and small project, so is HaikuOS it's already light-years ahead under the hood and in the GUI/programs it comes with.

Fuck you, brainlet.

>uptime circlejerk is still a thing
kys

Haiku doesn't try to do as much on their own as plan 9

They used a prewritten kernel NewOS, GCC compiler, gnu libc, network drivers from freebsd, and they're probably going to port DRM from linux for graphics

>his machine doesn't have 17400 days of uptime

Plan9 has the best community that I've been a part of. I'm on the dev discord chat and everybody just works to port code and help each other out and share good plan9 memes and it's just a really fuckin nice place to be. We don't use plan9 for any shitty reasons to make convulted pretentious points, we use it because we like it.

it has both

You mean plan9 and not 9front, I assume?

It's the plan9 discord, but we also do work on 9front and other 9-based software as well

Yeah, it was a joke, considering how notorious the 9front community is.

So from your point of view, is plan9 useable?

The bare minimum for me is:

Web browser, vim, irc, image viewer, video player. Support for common languages: {C, Perl, Python, Haskell, Go}

Of the above, what can Plan9 do, and what can it not? And in your opinion, if it can not do those things, why is that not a deal breaker for you / the plan9 community?

>vim
>perl/python
harmful

Plan9 has a web browser. It's not the best in the world but it's functional enough
Plan9 has a text editor named acme and it's my favorite thing in the world
you can do irc
you can view images
I haven't seen a plan9 video player, but inferno has that feature
plan9 has C, Perl, Python, and experimentally supports Go.

It has enough for me to be a useable machine, and we're always working on porting new software to make it even better. Plan9 meets the community's needs for a computer, and thats whats important.

fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html#0.1.3

>Plan9 is written in an C dialect
>blah blah blah link
>fake news

What is the Plan9 equivalent of this
freebsd.org/doc/handbook/
and is it as good?

It never matters how good a system is if I don't know how to, install it, maintain it, make software for it, control my hardware with it, etc.
The documentation must be on point.

I love plan9, but 9front is disgusting. The code style is completely inconsistent with mixed pointer sizes and whitespace everywhere.

looking through 9front.org and cat-v.org, the documentation is pretty good. And humorous.

I really, really want to like this... But I just can't see it being useable as your daily driver OS.

It seems to be the ultimate exoteric hipster OS

It's fine to be a daily driver, it just depends on what you need to drive. If you spend your time on a computer watching netflix and playing video games, it's not a good idea to run plan9. However, if you enjoy coding in your free time and tinkering then I think it's a great idea to use plan9.

Do you run plan9 directly on your PC or in a VM? Does it have wide support?

TL;DR of the difference between plan9, 9front, and inferno?

What is the most fully featured/active?

and is there _any_ way of emulating *nix programs?

Run it on a Pi.

read the fqa
>fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html#0.3

There is a posix c compiler, pcc.

Which means...? Obviously nothing large like Xorg, but can it run Vim? Or etc?

>>fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html
> Today, Plan 9 continues in its original form, as well as in several derivatives and forks:
>Plan 9 from Bell Labs — The original Plan 9. Effectively dead, all the developers have been run out of the Labs and/or are on display at Google.
>Plan 9 from User Space — Plan 9 userspace ported/imitated for UNIX (specifically OS X).
>9legacy — David du Colombier’s cherry picked collection of patches from various people/forks to Bell Labs Plan 9. (it is not a fork)
>9atom — Erik Quanstrom’s fork of Plan 9, maintained to erik’s needs and occasionally pilfered by 9front.
>9front — (that’s us) (we rule (we’re the tunnel snakes))
>NIX — High performance cloud computing is NIX — imploded in a cloud of political acrimony and retarded bureaucratic infighting.
>NxM — A kernel for manycore systems — never spotted in the wild.
>Clive — A new operating system from Francisco J. Ballesteros, designed to generate grantwriting practice material and research projects for otherwise indolent students.
>Akaros — Akaros is an open source, GPL-licensed operating system for manycore architectures. Has no bearing on anything but has attracted grant money.
>Harvey — Harvey is an effort to get the Plan 9 code working with gcc and clang.
>Inferno — Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs, but is now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software. Just kidding it is not developed or maintained.
tl;dr bell labs distribution is dead

>>fqa.9front.org/fqa8.html#8.7
>linuxemu is a program that can execute Linux/i386 ELF binaries on Plan 9. Semi-modern web browsers and other Linux programs may be run using linuxemu (if necessary, in conjunction with the equis X11 server).

>I386 only

ugh

I run it on a Dell D620

9front is probably the most active. as far as the other info, read the info at the links posted. the fqa, cat-v.org, and such sites have information on the features each provides and why you might choose one over another. 9front is generally recommended over plan9 due to plan9 not being developed. inferno has it's own thing going on

Does the pi version of plan 9 work on the Pi Zero W? Does it support wireless?

i use the rc shell on linux. It is nice, like it a lot. the only problem is that it does not have background jobs like bash so exitting vi hangs the shell

works on my machine

Maintain a fork of Dolphin (emulator) for it

>ugly mascott
Maybe you'll like Cirno more

> plan9
can we talk about Inferno as well?

Plan 9 and 9front have APE, which emulate a POSIX environment and provide the ISO C standard library and compiler (both in their original 1990/89 revisions). It's far from complete, but can run most standards-conform Unix applications and even X11 when needed.
doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape

No real point since without OpenGL support it wouldn't run above 5fps.

Does this even have any modern software

Yes

I can't get inferno built on my Macbook or on my 9front machine. Do you have any experience with it? I'd love to get it working. Is there an ISO available anywhere?

pls explain Plan9 to me

Much advanced
Very files
Such autism

I'm in, how do I install????

You'd probably have to ask Uriel.

fqa.9front.org/fqa4.html
Just follow the installation guide. Refer to chapter 3 of the FREQUENTLY QUESTIONED ANSWERS for supported hardware, or try it in a virtual machine first.

Okay, memes aside, I've been interested in plan9 for a while but thought it was completely dead. Good to know there's a small group developing a fork of it.
I'd join you if only it weren't for the fact I'm tired af after being done with my current full time project for the day.

Where can I find the discord and what's the main language for development?

The distributed nature of the OS is worth reading about, check the 9front FQA. The folks I know using Plan9 are using them as distributed servers.

Unfortunately, it's not going to be useful as a daily driver or anything of the sort. The mothra and abaco web browsers are extremely limited. Even if you can live with that, you won't be doing much programming aside from Plan9 C or Go.

The design of the OS is very elegant and its default toolchain is awesome. I use several things from plan9port daily, even using rio as a nice lightweight WM. If anything it is proof that good ideas can exist completely separate from UNIX as a base... but it still hasn't caught on.

It can't.
systemd is actually HURD.
Prove me wrong.