Why Plan-9?

Jim Choate ravage at einstein.ssz.com
Sun Oct 21 08:30:57 PDT 2001



On Sun, 21 Oct 2001, Sunder wrote:
 
> Why Plan-9?  I'd say go with OpenBSD. :)  Built in crypto, built in
> firewall,

<shrug> You mean there are OS'es that don't?

> secure on installation without you needing to tweak stuff.

<shrug> You mean all(!) OS'es don't do this already?

> Hell you can even tell it to encrypt swap pages.

<shrug> You mean all OS'es don't allow you to mount individual filesystems
        through an encryption layer?

 - Authored by same Bell-Labs crew that wrote Unix in the first place.
   Plan 9 was specifically designed to 'fix' the problems of Unix. It
   of course has its own problems. There is active support by the
   authors currently.

 - Has had many years of production use internal to Bell - Labs.

 - Open Source, no license required to build and distribute your own
   version.

 - Fully distributed in both process and file space

 - Has a unique three (3) kernel approach; I/O - Auth, File, Process

 - No 'root' user.

 - Supports IPv6 (default), IPv4, and IL (it's customer to Plan 9).

 - Filesystem is fully transitive, everything is treated like a file.
   This creates some unique opportunities to make publicly shared but
   privately maintaned resource pools. Hangar 18 is an attempt to do
   just this.

 - The filesystem is structured and featured in such a way that RDBMS
   sorts of solutions are moot. These functions are built into the
   filesystem itself (though not through SQL compliance).

 - Encryption (currently DES, needs fixing) built right in.

 - Doesn't use passwords, Instead it uses tickets (ie certificates).

 - Anonymity features with respect to both process and file space are
   not going to be hard to build in, Pike estimated at one points about
   150 lines of rc besides the actual crypto algorithm.

 - Global mobile log-in out of the box.

 - Has a wickedly new GUI.

 - Supports Inferno (run-time included) so that you can access one of the
   leading 'Internet Appliance' work environments. Plan 9 isn't real-time,
   but Inferno is. (It makes my Lego Mindstorm look like a directory tree, 
   makes programming real-time hardware operations rather easy)

http://plan.bell-labs.com

Another Open Source OS to look at for inspiration is unununium. It is a
kernel-less OS, everything is a module that can be loaded in/out at
run time as required. Has some very interesting applications with respect
to distributed computing. There is a working implimentation available from
Source Forge.


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