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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

I think of Plan 9 practically every day but I'm only reminded approximately once every few years to the existence of Hurd.

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Genuine question, as someone who has only ever played with Inferno and Plan 9 in virtual machines and only for brief periods of time in the process: what does Plan 9 actually buy you?

Like, I've read about how you can mount lots of things like filesystems and that sounds kind of neat but that also seemed like it might obscure latency and make things ridiculously slow, though it's entirely likely that I am misunderstanding how things work.

Forcing everything into the single abstraction of the filesystem lets do useful things with less trouble than other systems. As an example: Plan 9 doesn't have any use for containers because in its world chroot is exhaustive. You don't need special namespaces to control ex. network access, because network access goes through a filesystem in your chroot.

So, what you are saying is we need a cat with a phat wallet to fund development on the thing and make it sleek.

It would really be a real competitor with linux in the server market.

Maybe, though what I was trying to get at with my comment still isn't really addressed. It seems like if you're making everything a filesystem and making it so that the OS doesn't care about where the filesystem is, it can be very easy for latency costs to pile up.

I really should properly play with it, but it always seemed to me that it has the potential to add milliseconds of cost to each operation and that could be very slow.

Just because you can run it over the network doesn't mean you have to. Like, yeah, you can run Linux with root on NFS and yes it can make you vulnerable to latency problems, but you can also run Plan 9 completely on a single machine with all the myriad filesystems coming from from the local system (mostly virtual, but some actually hitting disk).

If you mean that microkernels ping-ponging between kernel and user space can impact perf: Maybe? I'd really want to see benchmarks.

> we need a cat with a phat wallet to fund development on the thing

Yup. I tried to bounce the idea of Mark Shuttleworth when I last interviewed him, but he wasn't interested.

You probably didn't take enough pop-psychology IQ test phone screens and write a long enough essay about how well you did in high-school math. If you had said you had proved the Collatz Conjecture when you were fourteen he probably would have listened.

At least that's the impression that I got from their interview process.

Harsh but not unfair.

Just to clarify, though: I wasn't interviewing for a job, I was interviewing the man for El Reg.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/11/mark_shuttleworth_ubu...

Plan 9's file system interface makes it a great way to build a network "mux". I added a reverse http(s) capable proxy using rc-httpd and webfs to effectively tunnel Shoutcast/Icecast streams from a Mac behind a firewall, with 9front being the only exposed endpoint.

It took an afternoon to figure out how, and was basically "cat".

I use 9front heavily.

Latency is never a problem in my experience unless you're mounting in resources from a different continent, where ssh is slow anyway. Even in those cases, the UX is closer to mosh, since rio remains local.

In general, plan 9 is fast. Compiling all of userspace and the kernel tanker just a couple minutes on my 11th gen Framework. Grepping a large repo also feels closer to ripgrep than gnu grep.

One well-known user runs his home network and automation system all as a 9grid. He even frequently shares details on his YouTube channel adventuresin9[0]. It's binge-worthy IMHO.

It's hard to convey how cohesive the whole system is. It's ridiculous how many things are reduced to trivial shell scripts, and the source code is so darn grokkable, greppable, and small that treating it as documention is actually sensible. Granted, this is almost necessary to become proficient in Plan 9 since there are so few network effects producing StackOverflow answers, blog tutorials etc.

Anyway, I hope you do end up jumping in!

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA

Interesting. Do you use it on real hardware? Are drivers an issue?

I have an old piece of shit laptop that’s not being used for anything, might be a fun excuse to try it out.

Personally, I have only run 9front on VMs, but my understanding is that 9front will boot on most x86/x86_64 machines. There is also explicit work to keep it running well on RPi hardware, which is what adventuresin9 runs.

For a bit more nitty-gritty, the 9front FQA[0] is worth running through.

[0]:https://fqa.9front.org/fqa3.html

I am having ideas about how I could build a firewall/router using 9p primitives now.

Damnit, I guess I know what I am doing this weekend.

Poor Inferno on the corner, as everyone keeps forgeting that it was the next step after Plan 9 was considered done by AT&T.

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