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9front OS

9front.org

60 pointsdoener29 comments

The snapshot system in gefs is really quite nice.

By default, you get snapshots every minute for the last hour, every hour for the last day, and every day into perpetuity. This is configurable. You can set as many cadences as you wish, with the ability to configure their frequency and lifetimes.

Actually, snapshots are like btrfs volumes in many ways, meaning they can be mounted, read from, and written to as desired. This allows the filesystem root to just be another snapshot with a default backup cadence as described above.

The gefs(4) manpage [0] has more info for those interested. It's a short and sweet read. The source [1], is under 12k lines of well-written code, comments and whitespace included. The author is also extremely responsive to issues and a pleasure to talk shop with.

Anyway, given the parsimony of the OS and the small community size, I find 9front to be a really nice incubator for playing around with new ideas.

[0]:https://man.9front.org/4/gefs [1]:https://git.9front.org/plan9front/9front/front/sys/src/cmd/g...

FWIW that snapshot system sounds almost the same as zrepl with zfs. The only difference being the zfs snapshots are read-only so you'd have to do a zfs send+recv to a dataset to mount it read/write. That and the defaults for the tiered snapshotting are different (mine is set to a snapshot every hour for the past day and every day for the past 2 weeks but I don't know what the default is).

zfs clone creates a writable dataset initially backed by a snapshot (and will prevent that snapshot from being deleted without first deleting the clone, even if entirely ship-of-theseused out of sharing any data with it)

9front is a legitimately cool software project and from what I can tell a cool set of people. I find it bizarre how many people have a negative reaction to a community that doesn't dress itself up in Corporate Memphis and idolize startup-world demigods.

We need more of this type of project today. It is the old Internet, still alive.

Plan 9 was interesting for me because I was just at the point of deciding "maybe everything being a file is a mistake". Then I learned about plan 9 and it blew my mind. Really a very neat system.

I’ve been playing with it on an old laptop. It took me a bit to “get it”, but once the “everything exposes filesystems” thing clicked in my brain, I grew to really like it. I would love to try daily driving 9Front but the lack of a modern browser and video acceleration is a pretty hard blocker.

I still would like to make a server with it though. Maybe that would be a good weekend project.

It's not the most complete lens, but I've always also thought of it as "lots of servers advertising services through a centralized directory" (e.g. like NT's Object Manager).

But, I don't think the Plan 9 team ever figured out how to elegantly implement security/isolation-related primitives like secret storage with a single general mechanism. Their "canonical" way of providing secure authentication relies on a few ad-hoc capability mechanisms, built on top of 9P deeply integrated with some special-purpose kernel features. [1] If Bell Labs had more time, I think they would've ended up rethinking 9P around this issue.

[1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2013/readings/plan9auth.pdf

It is, that is why it doesn't have any proper graphics or video acceleration.

Treating GPUs as files isn't something that tends to win performance benchmarks.

So, hypothetically, if P9 had won, would it be better? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be a perfectly capable interface. Is there a technical limitation here?

I don't know much about graphics, but having tried to get graphics drivers working on Linux for a couple decades, it seems like you're missing some context about proprietary interfaces here

It's a community. Of course it has in jokes. And of course to an outsider they beg questions but the point is not to amuse outsiders.

It is possible to assert the point is to identify outsiders. Or exclude. Or test to find insiders, to welcome people who chose to align, or not.

I never invested enough to feel I'd even knocked on the door, let alone incanted a phrase to be let in. However I have known IRL and online many who did and they aren't bad people. Or even really exclusive or excluding. They just have a culture. And if it excludes the dismal or the misaligned or the fame seekers and hangers on, that's probably not just a side effect.

Compsci is littered with ingroups and outsiders. The people who get invited to Tannenbaums workshops. The people who got invited once and never again. The people who don't get invites. This is normal. Not everyone gets invited to join the royal society and not everyone wants to.

Some people assert its an intelligence test but I remain a fan of the aphorism from "war games" - the only winning move is not to play.

As if p9 would somehow be improved by a marketing department

They could use sex to sell.

"imagine everything is a file"

That's the Newcastle connection and "..." supplementing "." And ".."

That would be kubernetes, right? Or the people using 9fs as a fast filesystem into their containers no matter what exterior architecture, without realising where it comes from.

This seems like a reply to a point no one made.

A non sequiteur? Yes, I could see that. But, a read of the comment chain suggested to me a point could be made, without an explicit question being asked but perhaps we read differently.

> A non sequiteur? Yes, I could see that.

No - just a reply to a point no one made :)

> a read of the comment chain suggested to me a point could be made, without an explicit question being asked

Fair enough.

you are not supposed to understand this

This is wildly and seemingly unnecessarily chaotic and I am at a loss for its purpose. Probably just my own ignorance/laziness. But it does feel like its _trying_ to be hard to understand/navigate and overly random/weird. My curiosity got the best of me but I left feeling I just wasted 10 minutes.

EDIT: website is just an inside joke and not helpful. OS is real but also not helpful. https://www.reddit.com/r/plan9/comments/1mr6cyr/comment/n8xp...

OS is designed by Bell Labs, of Unix and C fame, but ok.

EDIT: I think some of the in-jokey, arty farty culture about it is because the rest of us didn't run with it, it's basically for hobby and personal use - so its culture now. But about any one I know who has used it enough to "grok" it kinda is like "wow if this won" because its kinda such a paradigmatically good thing whole kind of cottage industries of software may not even exist because the user would be able to write a pipe from a file that is a device to write to another one type thing.

Plan 9 is supposed to be absurd. Pull the cork out of your ass lmao

Hackers are weird and not always helpful.

Whatever asshole built this site - I’m in. Downloading ISO.

> the plan fell off

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Read the FQA, Frequently Questioned Answers, for a decent introduction, though in a tongue in cheek manner.

What is this, please?

Is this a software or a political project?

Yes

it's modern art

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