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Comment by m_sahaf | Hacker News Reader

I've played with Pla9 a bit and I find it overall interesting. Here are the things from the top of my head that are improvements over Unix:

- Truly everything is a file. No exceptions; no special cases.

- Symlinks do not feel like a hack causing trouble. If you need a reference to a directory in another path, you mount it. If your software writes its binaries into its custom directory and you want the binaries within the $PATH, you mount that custom directory into /bin (or so, from what I remember).

- Namespace isolation for processes.

- Distributed file system

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> - Namespace isolation for processes.

This is seriously underappreciated IMO. You can entirely replace access control with private namespaces without any real loss in generality. In fact, they're more flexible and secure.

And actually that's exactly what the FreeBSD Jails paper says too. Their aim was to make uid 0 more granular by segmenting the system so that you have different access control in those jails.

You see some of these ideas in Linux, but as with all Linux kernel technologies they all feel like they've not been written with a design in mind from the start (just look at epoll, namespaces, /proc, and so on).

All UNIX flavours are pretty late to the party though, even plan 9. This sort of isolation was a feature of most capability operating systems since the 60s.

> Truly everything is a file. No exceptions; no special cases.

As graphics fan, I wonder how this would work out with modern GPU driver layers.

John Carmack used to participate in the Plan 9 mailing lists

https://marc.info/?a=111558719100068&r=1&w=4

Though Rob Pike might have not been very cooperative or enthusiastic

https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558699517143&w=4

He goes on about some interesting architectural advantages already in Plan 9 from a graphics programming standpoint and capitalizing on them someday.

It'd be interesting to hear about how far along he got.

https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558698816997&w=4

Here he talks about trying to hack Plan 9 to run Quake https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558698416915&w=4

Interesting read, including some QNX and Amiga related stuff, thanks.

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