A team comprised of members from Bell-Labs, IBM Research, Sandia National Labs, and Vita Nuova has completed a port of Plan 9 to the Blue Gene supercomputer. Plan 9 kernels are running on both the compute nodes and the I/O nodes and the Ethernet, Torus, Collective Network, Barrier Network, and Management network are all supported. Screenshots are available on the development blog, and a live-demo will be attempted during the USENIX poster session.
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Member since:2007-06-18
X-Window? GUI? What flexibility?
We are talking about an operating system not about a geek-chick magnet! Plan 9 comes with a GUI that has all and more capabilities than X-Window, like network transparency (even if it has no networking code on it) and alpha blending (Porter-Duff algebra... The "Duff" guy worked at bell labs at the time rio, the Plan 9 GUI came to life). I am not saying that it is beautiful, though... But I like it and it gets my work done.
Plan 9 and Inferno capabilities for distributed computing are trully amazing... An this is the stuff that matters..
Please, for all those who love giving opinions... Pleas e read a little and get really informed about what is going on.
Congratulations to the Plan 9 on Blue Gene/L team!!
Member since:2006-04-21
X-Window? GUI? What flexibility?
You know, the flexibility that allows you to choose WindowMaker or blackbox, GNOME or KDE?
We are talking about an operating system not about a geek-chick magnet! Plan 9 comes with a GUI that has all and more capabilities than X-Window, like network transparency (even if it has no networking code on it) and alpha blending (Porter-Duff algebra... The "Duff" guy worked at bell labs at the time rio, the Plan 9 GUI came to life). I am not saying that it is beautiful, though... But I like it and it gets my work done.
It may have "more capabilities than X Window", but it sorely lacks the one I wrote about in my first post. Yes, there will always be people who really don't give a damn about the state of their windowing system as long as it works, but I suspect those among us who can't work with a system which looks like a camel's rear end are in the majority. And of course although we may all agree that X (the variable, not the window system) looks like a camel's arse, we're very unlikely to all agree on whether A, B, C, Y, or Z doesn't.
Member since:2005-07-24
Member since:2006-04-21
Could you elaborate? I don't quite understand what you mean about too much policy within the mechanism. I always wondered if X could do with a little more policy laid down.
I mean this: UNIX and the X Window system (which isn't UNIX specific) both specify that the system should have "a user interface" (respectively, the shell and a window manager and widget toolkit) (= mechanism), but don't specify how it should work or what it should look like (= policy): Thus you get bash and zsh and csh and tcsh and scsh et al., and GNOME and KDE and WindowMaker and FVWM and blackbox, or Motif and Athena et al. Of course both UNIX and the X Window System *do* both implement a *little* policy, but not much: Filesystem workings (10 permissions bits, hierarchical directories and so on) on the one hand, transmission strategies (via TCP/IP or DECNET) on the other, but a lot less than a system like, say, Windows, MacOS or Plan 9. You can get shells for Windows (such as LiteSTEP), and maybe even for MacOS X and Plan 9, but by necessity they mung the inner workings of the environment a lot more than stuff like GNOME or KDE needs to - all else being equal, for example, it would probably have been significantly harder to write a reparenting* window manager for Windows than it was for X11.
*Where the WM takes control of the window positioning from the lower levels of X.
Member since:
2006-04-21
Could be (have been?) interesting, but there have been several problems with it. Not least, as appositely shown in the screenshot, the intermingling of policy (or perhaps too much policy) with mechanism in the window system. An OS for the 1990s should come with a GUI, but to become an OS for the 21st century it needs to have the kind of flexibility in interface design that the X Window System provides.