A new version of Plan 9 has been released. “Major changes were made to /sys/src/fs, removing some dead code. Some major bugs were fixed. New features were added and the memory limit was increased.” More information can be found in the mailing list message. For those that don’t know: “Plan 9 was born in the same lab where Unix began. Underneath, though, lies a new kind of system, organized around communication and naming rather than files and processes. In Plan 9, distributed computing is a central premise, not an evolutionary add-on.”
Where can I use Plan9 professionally?
what activity does Plan9 do better than any other operating system?
Grid Computing!
Indeed! Grid Computing on steroids. :-p
I use PLAN 9 at home to take care of my *NIX machines, of course having 9vfs in the linux kernel helps a helluva lot.
Wow, someone is a grouch, it’s a hobby OS many of the original Unix people.
Maybe a site _specifically about different OSes_ isn’t your kind of place…
I don’t see what’s so grouchy about the parent’s questions. It’s not like he was trolling, he might have simply be interested whether it viable to use Plan 9 in a working environment. What’s wrong with a question like that?
I don’t think he was trolling either. Sounded like a legit question to me.
I’m not aware of any corporations that use vanilla Plan 9 outside of Lucent. There is a product out there called Inferno that, from what I understand, is Plan 9 with a prettier interface and maybe some extra libraries thrown in, repackaged so that it can run as a sort of virtual machine on top of a variety of host platforms. It’s marketed for grid and distributed computing applications. You can check out its website at http://www.virtuanova.com – I believe there’s now a Free version you can download and try if you want to see it in action.
There are also some academic institutions that use Plan 9.
In answer to your second question, I suggest taking a look at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ (You can also get to it without cut-and-paste by clicking the green “Plan 9” in the article text.) (The short answer is, what it does better than any other platform is coordinating resources among computers connected by a network.)
In answer to your implied third question, there is such a thing as research, and although the direct products of a research project may never be used commercially or make it into the home, things learned through research often have a huge impact in the project’s field of study. In fact, one might go so far as to say that few or no commercial or household products would exist without research.
Another non-vanilla user: nCube (now owned by C-COR). They run Transit, a Plan 9 derivative, on their MediaCubes. Nifty stuff.
Inferno is related to Plan 9, but not quite as closely as you say. Much of its kernel source is derived from Plan 9’s, and many of the ideas are the same, but Inferno has some important differences. First, in addition to running on raw hardware, it can also run as an application under many other OSs, with no difference to applications running within Inferno. Second, all applications are written in Limbo, a simply wonderful language for concurrent programming.
There are other differences, of course (Inferno has lighter resource requirements, Plan 9 has better storage, differing graphics systems), but those are the big ones.
But I’m slightly surprised to see it mentioned like this.
Well, whatever server is serving the Plan9 website appears to be overloaded. I hope it’s not running Plan9.
GET BACK. Plan 9 should be on equal footing like Linux/BSD/Solaris.
To be fair, this is not a new release. There have been numerous much more involved changes to Plan 9 in the last year than this one.
These changes mentioned are for a version of the Plan 9 file server, which is a branch of an old plan 9 kernel – intended only to be a remote file server.
The fossil fileserver/system runs on the standard Plan 9 kernel and replaced this older fileserver (aka KenFS) –
though some people still use it for compatibility/etc. and keep improving it.
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDEADYET.pdf
I think of it as a good study in ‘service oriented architectural’ basic concepts & methods.
I think of it as a nice way to study how *nixes should have been.
The concepts it’s based on would have removed amazingly much cruft in todays unixes (like the freebsd jails, systrace, adhoc solutions bolted on later – like the various sound servers, ttys, chroots, etc.)
Anyone got dibs on this one yet?
…and don’t forget Plan 9 has a LIVE CD available for download!
Sweet, I didn’t know people were still working on Plan 9. I did know that it did a lot of things right and that a lot of its concepts have made their way into some of the Linux and BSD kernels and distros. Very cool.