File indexing and searching for Plan 9 [pdf]
lsub.org
lsub.org
It's more like the focus has shifted from traditional OS kernels into virtualization, distributed systems and verification.
RE: seL4 borrows a lot of TrustedBSD (and to some extent Trusted Solaris). I don't know what the technical implementation details of Xen/XenServer are but once you add all the doo-dads, you've basically got VMware ESX with VMotion/HA/VSan in terms of functionality. I'll give VMware credit because VSan appliances are an easy-to-configure-and-deploy HA fairly-high-IOPS component of the VMware suite that's going to be a EMC SAN killer. The innovation there is how well it's integrated into the rest of the VMware virtual networking/vMotion/HA/disaster recovery suite, though, and not anything you could present at a conference.
I haven't looked at Mirage recently but I don't think they're doing anything really groundbreaking (i.e. academically; you won't see papers being presented on it)- a clever unikernel and useful tool but certainly not research. Read the old IBM Redbooks for z/OS and there's are numerous common components between the 1980s implementation of a System/390 running a hypervisor and and the Xen/ESX internals. I can only comment on IBM's stuff with confidence as a former IBMer, but VAX/VMS' clustering probably shares a lot of of what ESX is doing.
Other than IBM and MSR, a heavy funder of SPJ at Haskell and F# support as a primary language, definitely paid for itself many times over w/r/t language research the Python 3.5 async await syntax-sugar and, to some extent semantics, which was influenced by C# clearly, derived from F#2. Apple has a few people working on Clang (though not LLVM IIRC, so eh). Facebook has a really interesting language agnostic suite of analysis (primarily static) which I'm tracking carefully because it looks like it has a boatload of interesting capabilities.
There's a lot of interesting research going on, but not much of it is done by corporations, Microsoft Research notwithstanding.
What are some of the ways a beginner can get into Plan9? Can I use it as a Desktop Operating System on my old Thinkpad? What can I do with it? Does it run a modern browser? Could it run QEMU?
I've had much more luck with 9front distribution, it seems maintained at least.
A desktop OS is a vague term, but you have to be super undemanding to use Plan 9 in the modern environment. If you plan to develop on it, be aware: it's quite possible, but it is not POSIX-compatible, it has its own, often quite opinionated tools (Acme editor with its obsessive three-button mouse usage is something I could not get used to), it is often a world-in-itself. It has C, Go, Mercurial, Python though. Don't expect many opensource projects we take for granted to be available (databases, servers, etc). However, 9front has its own "repository" [0] that has ssh, vim, ghc and other basic Unix tools.
No, neither Plan 9 nor 9front run a modern internet browser. A modern browser is a complex, non-portable, monolithic, demanding beast. It just does not fit the Plan 9 vision, so the common piece of advice is to run a VNC session to a mainstream OS to browse the internet. `elinks` is "a graphical browser" according to Plan 9 people (and I rather agree).
This is impression of a beginner, so feel free to correct me.
[0] http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Contrib_Index (oops, it is offline at the moment).
I love emacs so, so much (I'm the nerd who has foot pedals, and I've spent at least 1k hours perfecting my .emacs.d over the last 10 years). It's ability to meta-modify itself is incredible.
Editor rant for nerds who have spent at least 100 hours on .vimrc or emacs.d:
But ACME takes it to the next level. It feels like Smalltalk. It exposes all buffers via a FUSE block device you can mount, and all of a sudden you can feed buffers or sub-selections of buffers to standard UNIX utils. Literally everything that takes input from STDIN you can pipe to, and optionally return to the same buffer via STDOUT. You're no tied to languages. Hating Vimscript or Elisp becomes irrelevant because as long as you can run the binary and pipe to/from it, you can manipulate your data.
It's fantastic for exploratory scripting, literate programming and my only qualm with it is I'm a home-rower. (That is, all of my interfacing revolves around keeping my wrists and about 1/4" of my lower palm. My wrists are planted in that specific position 98% of the time, with movement primarily centered around pivoting my wrists about those two radial points).
My idea is to use Caps as a meta-key, then have s,d,f act as 1,2,3 on the mouse. Even with chording, it doesn't impose a stretch.
If you are passionate about editors, watch Russ Cox's talk on ACME. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M.