Comment by butterisgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by butterisgood | Hacker News Reader

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Everything is a file system. You can mount almost all things. All things have private namespaces by default.

Right down to the TCP/IP stack... you can run a program called "sshnet" and connect to a remote unix box, the /net in that process' namespace now has a tunnel to the remote box, and all children of that process that opt-in to share the namespace now have a VPN-like to the network you just ssh'd to.

Because the network stack is a file system you can do basic open, read, write, close stuff to dial up remote services and work with them. As such there's IRC clients written in the shell, without evil extensions like /dev/tcp in bash.

It's fun, but it doesn't outrun any other OS I've seen. Maybe that's changed.

Honest question: If we extend dbus to be similarly pervasive in Linux (via BUS1 or whatever ends up being merged), won't it have pretty much the same benefits? Once it's in-kernel I'm 100% sure we'll end up with a virtual file system for accessing it. It will definitely never be quite as elegant and integrated in the system as Plan9, but maybe we could reap similar benefits?

Well the nice thing, maybe, about Plan 9's virtualization of resources is that they all follow some 9P variant (simple protocol).

9p is v9fs in linux. There's FUSE 9p stuff for other platforms. There's a virtualized Erlang runtime that sits directly on Xen as the OS that uses 9p. 9p is part of QEMU's way of talking to the guest (or is it the host?) OS.

It's been on a lego mindstorm brick too.

To me, kernel dbus is a bit more like mach_ports. Those have their own advantages too. As did Solaris Doors.

> If we extend dbus to be similarly pervasive in Linux

That kind of pervasiveness involve replacing all i/o through the entire system with dbus. File systems, netlink, sun rpc, mmap, signals and kill, tcp, and so on.

And then making dbus sanely deal with networking and authentication.

9p isn't just pervasive: it's the only way to talk to the system, which means that if you want to mess with namespacing things, all you need to think about is 9p.

Linux is no longer pure Unix. Linux has adopted parts of plan 9.

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