Comment by m_sahaf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_sahaf | Hacker News Reader

There are times when I wish Plan9 and/or Inferno took off and won some respectable market share. Having a laptop, smartphone, tablet, Synology storage at home, servers on DO, and remnant external HDD from prior era becomes frustrating because my files end up being everywhere and nowhere. There were times when I want to be able to start working on some code on my laptop, pause, then continue work on my tablet later on. At those moments it would have been wonderful if I had Plan9's ability to mount remote filesystems, sync across the network, and have consistent view however I access the data. Yes, SSHFS is available, and the same protocol from Plan9 is available in Linux nowadays, but setting them up isn't as simple as it was in Plan9 and being native to the OS.

That, in addition to the fixes it had (truly everything is a file) and the innovative features delivered (e.g. namespaces).

Can we revive them? Inferno's development seems to have slowed down to a halt.

Plan 9 (and some of its distributions, namely 9front and 9pi, the latter being Plan 9 for the Raspberry Pi) are still developed. No revival needed. You'll just have to download, install and use them. And they come with VNC, if you absolutely need incompatible software like a sane web browser.

edit: That said, I happily use some of Plan9port every day. There never was a better Acme editor (or, rather, Acme2k) on any other operating system. Amazing concept!

Yeah Richard Miller just put out tentative support for the Raspberry Pi 4 for his pi port.

https://9p.io/sources/contrib/miller/9/bcm/

No need for vnc on 9front to access a browser nowadays. You can run the browser inside vmx.

The manpage ("bugs") suggests that I shouldn't do that. But thank you a lot - I had, indeed, entirely missed that!

Naaah it just works fine

As long as your processor supports vmx ofc

Just ask aux/icanhasvmx :)

Manuals:

- http://man.cat-v.org/9front/1/vmx

- http://man.cat-v.org/9front/3/vmx

> There were times when I want to be able to start working on some code on my laptop, pause, then continue work on my tablet later on

In order to do these things 'cleanly' (with a truly unified view of the entire "system"), you need some sort of process migration infrastructure that even Plan9 and Inferno don't really give you, AFAICT. Projects like OpenMosix and OpenSSI attempted to provide this, but I'm not sure to what extent they were successful, given that they've all been abandoned and bitrotted. Today, one might try to do the same sort of thing while also taking advantage of the new kernel-based namespacing that Linux provides, which might make some things somewhat easier.

Whoa, not going that far. No processes are moving from one computer to another, just proper file syncing and maybe some centralized authentication.

Inferno and Plan 9 sorta had this. Octopus and Plan B were both allowed picking up where you left off on some other machine.

CRIU should allow you to migrate a running process from one system to another, particularly in combination with a container (Docker or LXC/D).

Doesn't this work on about nothing in practice? Like nothing that has an open file, no gui apps etc.

Fairly sure files, network connections, ... are not a problem, unless I'm confusing it with a different migration solution. GUI apps probably only work if access through some network connection.

Here is a writeup of using CRIU on openvpn: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/using-criu-upgrade-vpn-server...

So it seems to work. But I'm no expert and I've never done it, so I might well be missing something.

You can have centralized / common auth using LDAP, even across platform.

You can have file sync with syncthing, or similar, again across platforms.

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