“This paper describes the implementation and use of the Plan 9 distributed resource protocol 9P under the Linux 2.6 operating system. The use of the 9P protocol along with the recent addition of private name spaces to the 2.6 kernel creates a foundation for seamless distributed computing using Linux. We review the design principles and benefits of Plan 9 distributed systems, go over the basics of the 9P protocol, describe 9P extensions to better support UNIX file systems, and show some example Linux distributed applications using 9P to provide system and application services.”
The good thing of free software is that takes(stole?) the good ideas without mattering from where they come.
Plan9 has great ideas!
Not only Open source, but also Microsoft is doing the same as seen from their history and today…!
Surely one of the more surprising additions to the Linux 2.6 kernel. From reading the article I do get the idea that the system was frankensteined into Linux; from on the one hand a system that’s meant as successor to unix, to on the other hand a system that’s meant as clone of unix. Linux isn’t built for this thing.
Interesting things could be done with a specialised distro built around the concept of a fully distributed resource cluster, which would be the way to leverage the whole thing to something genuinely usefull.
Linux originally wasnt developed for anything more than i386 arch with IDE drives. As with all systems it evolved. Plan 9 fs with support for some extensions is now available as part of the 2.6.14 upstream kernel
Not only does Plan 9 have great ideas, it has great implementations of those ideas. Because of this, it shouldn’t be cloned or merged into other OSes. Instead, it should rightfully become mainstream.
“The good thing of free software is that takes(stole?) the good ideas without mattering from where they come.
Not only Open source, but also Microsoft is doing the same thing as seen from their past history and today…!
I am an avid supporter of Plan9, and have been using it for over 2 years now with 3 systems. This is truly great news to hear that 9P is being implemented in Linux.