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
Come on...
Programming a new Window Manager/Desktop enviroment for X-Window is a terrible experience... And yes, APIs make life easier for those using KDE... But to get KDE working... heh... You have to know *a lot" about the inner workings, workouts and bugs of X-Window.
Plan 9 is quite simple, you don't need to know how a lot of stuff to get things done...
And there are several choices for those running Plan 9. We can run rio or acme if we like it... we can rio on rio, acme on rio... no gui at all... or we can implement a new one (Actually there are some new ideas about it)...
Anyway... The GUI isn't the priority. Plan 9 is not a geek-chick magnet... It is a computer science enviroment that can be a great os for those who enjoy it, like me and some hundreds of persons...
Once you get it, Plan 9 isn't complex... Au contraire....
Of course, it doesn't mean its pretty 
(But I happen to like it and, in general, plan 9 users like it)(I also like KDE, good stuff it is)(Gnome is nice too! Not for me... But good stuff too)
But, the post is about having plan 9 running on a supercomputer. That is great. Does somebody know if they got Inferno running over that Plan 9 installation?
Member since:2006-07-19
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.