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(less frequently asked questions)

Introduction

Hardware and Software

Installation and Administration

General Information

INTRODUCTION

  • What is Plan 9?

Plan 9 is a (relatively) new computer operating system and associated utilities. It was built by the Computing Science Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Alcatel-Lucent), the same group that developed Unix, C, and C++.

Plan 9 is a distributed system. In the most general configuration, it uses three kinds of components: terminals that sit on users' desks, file servers that store permanent data, and other servers that provide faster CPUs, user authentication, and network gateways. These components are connected by various kinds of networks, including Ethernet, specially-built fiber networks, ordinary modem connections, and ISDN. In typical use, users interact with applications that run either on their terminals or on CPU servers, and the applications get their data from the file servers. The design, however, is highly configurable; it escapes from specific models of networked workstations and central machine service.

  • For History Buffs

The first edition of Plan 9 was released in 1993, and was only available to universities.

In 1995 the second edition was available for purchase under a shrink-wrap license.

On June 7, 2000, the third release was made available for free download under an open source agreement.

The current, fourth edition of the system was released on April, 2002. At first it was made available under same license as a third edition, but on 9 June, 2003, was approved new open source license -- Lucent Public License.

  • What is in the latest Plan 9 release?

The fourth release of Plan 9 provides a major overhaul of the system at every level. From the underlying file system protocol, 9P, through the kernel, libraries, and applications, almost everything has been modified and, in many cases, redesigned or rewritten. For more details, see the release notes at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/release4.html.

While there have not been any "official" releases for some time development is very active both inside and outside the Labs and many changes and updates have been done all over the system; the ISO images in the web site are rebuilt daily based on the latest source tree. For updating running systems the replica(1) system is used. See staying up to date for more details.

Plan 9 is the work of many people. The protocol was begun by Ken Thompson; naming was integrated by Rob Pike and networking by Dave Presotto. Phil Winterbottom simplified the management of name spaces and re-engineered the system. They were joined by Tom Killian, Jim McKie, and Howard Trickey in bringing the system up on various machines and making device drivers. Thompson made the C compiler; Pike, window systems; Tom Duff, the shell and raster graphics; Winterbottom, Alef; Trickey, Duff, and Andrew Hume, APE. Bob Flandrena ported a myriad of programs to Plan 9. Russ Cox did much of the work updating the graphics and creating the new disk and bootstrap model as well as providing a number of new commands; David Hogan ported Plan 9 to the Dec Alpha; and Sape Mullender wrote the new thread library. Other contributors include Alan Berenbaum, Lorinda Cherry, Bill Cheswick, Sean Dorward, David Gay, Paul Glick, Eric Grosse, John Hobby, Gerard Holzmann, Brian Kernighan, Bart Locanthi, Doug McIlroy, Judy Paone, Sean Quinlan, Bob Restrick, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, Cliff Young, Bruce Ellis, Charles Forsyth, Eric Van Hensbergen, and Tad Hunt.

Plan 9 group photo is available at Dennis Ritchie's page: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/pix/index1.html.

Plan 9 is itself an operating system; it doesn't run as an application under another system. It was written from the ground up and doesn't include other people's code. Although the OS's interface to applications is strongly influenced by the approach of Unix, it's not a replacement for Unix, it is a new design.

Plan 9 exploits, as far as possible, three basic technical ideas: first, all the system objects present themselves as named files that are manipulated by read/write operations; second, all these files may exist either locally or remotely, and respond to a standard protocol; third, the file system name space -- the set of objects visible to a program -- is dynamically and individually adjustable for each of the programs running on a particular machine. The first two of these ideas were foreshadowed in Unix and to a lesser extent in other systems, while the third is new: it allows a new engineering solution to the problems of distributed computing and graphics. Plan 9's approach means that application programs don't need to know where they are running; where, and on what kind of machine, to run a Plan 9 program is an economic decision that doesn't affect the construction of the application itself.

Plan 9's approach improves generality and modularity of application design by encouraging servers that make any kind of information appear to users and to applications just like collections of ordinary files. Here are a few examples.

The Plan 9 window system (called rio) is small and clean in part because its design is centered on providing a virtual keyboard, mouse, and screen to each of the applications running under it, while using the real keyboard, mouse, and screen supplied by the operating system. That is -- besides creating, deleting, and arranging the windows themselves -- its job is be a server for certain resources used by its clients. As a side benefit, this approach means that the window system can run recursively in one of its windows, or even on another machine.

Plan 9 users do Internet FTP by starting a local program that makes all the files on any FTP server (anywhere on the Internet) appear to be local files. Plan 9 PC users with a DOS/Windows partition on their disk can use the files stored there. ISO 9660 CD-ROMs and tar and cpio tapes all behave as if they were native file systems. The complete I/O behavior and performance of any application can be monitored by running it under a server that sees all its interactions. The debugger can examine a program on another machine even if it is running on a different hardware architecture.

Another example is the approach to networks. In Plan 9, each network presents itself as a set of files for connection creation, I/O, and control. A common semantic core for the operations is agreed upon, together with a general server for translating human-readable addresses to network-specific ones. As a result, applications don't care which kind of network (TCP/IP, ISDN, modem) they are using. In fact, applications don't even know whether the network they are using is physically attached to the machine the application is running on: the network interface files can be imported from another machine.

This is best described by Dave Presotto's 9fans post (from 7 May 2003):

Before Plan 9, we were running lots of Unices held together by a few networks, a remote file system (different uid's on each Unix), and a bunch of remote execution commands. We hated it since it was much harder to manage and use than our old single multiuser machine. We wanted an environment that not only put together a lot of boxes and made them look like one but which also would make use of the new technologies that were appearing (SMP's, heterogeneous architectures, juke boxes, ...).

The thought was that the new environment wouldn't change from Unix except where we thought it would make our goal easier to build. The kernel had to go. The single monitor view of the Unix kernel was a real pain for making good use of the SMP's. Therefore, we started that from scratch. That didn't mean that the kernel interface had to change though. That was a separate topic. Lots of others have rewritten the kernel from the ground up while maintaining something that looked more like a Unix.

Ken and Rob thought up the idea of building everything around a single file system protocol. They also added the idea of a subjective namespace to try to unify all the binding ideas of Unix. This name space is the one thing underlying Plan 9. We could have done the same thing to a Unix kernel (with an infinite amount of sweating) but the result would have been the same from the user standpoint, i.e., a system that looks very different. The ease which with it can be done can be witnessed by the number of failed/stalled attempts to add the Plan 9 namespace to Linux ...

Also, we were tired of the general kitchen sink nature of Unix, especially of System V. If there were 3 projects or groups to do a single thing (like character processing, shared memory, networking, ...) they all eventually got jammed in. We wanted something simpler to work with.

Lastly, we had all developed an extreme allergy to code filled with #if, #ifdef, #else, #elseif. Getting rid of that cruft by sticking differences into separate files/routines required a hell of a lot of rewriting.

So the result was a different kernel, with a different design philosophy, a similar but different interface, but mostly the same old commands.

If you think that Unix was just a single track in comparison, you're sadly mistaken. We just made more of a bend than others did.

We are guilty of rewriting commands just for the sake of doing it. The reason there was sometimes legitimate, to match our different kernel interfaces or whatever. However, it was just as often so we wouldn't have to worry about Unix licenses.

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

  • What platforms does it run on?

The Plan 9 kernel and applications are highly portable. Plan 9 runs on many architectures, among others: x86, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC and ARM.

Data structures and protocols are designed for distributed computing on machines of diverse design. Except for necessarily machine-dependent parts of the kernel, the compilers, and a few libraries, there is a single source representation for everything.

To find out whether Plan 9 supports your hardware, read The Various Ports and Supported PC Hardware.

Yes, SMP has been always well supported and over the years it has been used under many architectures. By default, as it comes out the box, the release has SMP operation disabled by an option ``*nomp=1'' in the plan9.ini config file.

Summary of the Plan 9 Development Environment

See the software for Plan 9 page.

No, not in the conventional sense. It is written in a strict dialect of ISO/ANSI C. In a wider sense, its general design of making all its ``objects'' look like files to which one talks in a well-defined protocol shows a related approach.

Plan 9 comes with APE, a library that makes it easy to import POSIX-conforming applications. There is also a library that emulates the Berkeley socket interface.

See also Porting alien software to Plan 9.

As might be expected, the answer depends on what you want to do. The kernel, the window system, and the basic applications will run comfortably on a PC with 32MB of memory.

The standard interface doesn't use icons or drag-n-drop; Plan 9 people tend to be text-oriented. But the window system, the editor, and the general feel are very mousy, very point-and-click: Plan 9 windows are much more than a bunch of glass TTYs. The system supports the graphics primitives and libraries of basic software for building GUIs.

Also see the screenshots page.

Plan 9 really works well only with a three-button mouse. In the meantime, Shift-Right-button will simulate a middle button, but that is inadequate for acme's chording.

The Plan 9 window system doesn't obey any inline cursor controls, since none of the native applications use cursor-addressing. All cursor control in rio, Acme and sam is via the mouse.

To see some excellent articles on this important and divisive user interface issue read http://www.asktog.com/readerMail/1999-12ReaderMail.html.

If you want to get from Plan 9 to Unix systems, you can run vt in one of your windows, telnet/rlogin to Unix, and set the term/TERM variable accordingly on the Unix end. See vt(1) for more details; note that vt can emulate a VT100 VT220 or ANSI terminal.

The character set is Unicode, the 16-bit set unified with the ISO 10646 standard for representing languages used throughout the world. The system and its utilities support Unicode using a byte-stream representation (called UTF-8) that is compatible with ASCII. On Plan 9, one may grep for Cyrillic strings in a file with a Japanese name and see the results appear correctly on the terminal.

The encoding known today as UTF-8 was invented by Ken Thompson. It was born during the evening hours of 1992-09-02 in a New Jersey diner, where he designed it in the presence of Rob Pike on a placemat (see Rob Pike's UTF-8 history). It replaced an earlier attempt to design a FSS/UTF (file system safe UCS transformation format) that was circulated in an X/Open working document in August 1992 by Gary Miller (IBM), Greger Leijonhufvud and John Entenmann (SMI) as a replacement for the division-heavy UTF-1 encoding from the first edition of ISO 10646-1. Pike and Thompson turned by the end of the first week of September 1992 Plan 9 from Bell Labs into the first operating system to use UTF-8 and reported about their experience at the USENIX Winter 1993 Technical Conference, San Diego, January 25-29, 1993, Proceedings, pp. 43-50. FSS/UTF was briefly also referred to as UTF-2 and later renamed into UTF-8, and pushed through the standards process by the X/Open Joint Internationalization Group XOJIG.

For more details about the history of UTF-8 see: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history

Plan 9's authentication design is akin to that of MIT's Kerberos. Passwords are never sent over networks; instead encrypted tickets are obtained from an authentication server. It doesn't have the concept of ``set UID'' programs. The file server doesn't run user programs, and except at its own console, it doesn't allow access to protected files except by authenticated owners. The concept of a special ``root'' user is gone.

The fourth edition of Plan 9 includes a substantially reworked security architecture, described in the USENIX Security 2002 conference paper by Russ Cox, Eric Grosse, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Sean Quinlan.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.pdf.

The distribution includes a u9fs(4) server that runs on Unix-compatible systems and understands the native Plan 9 remote file protocol, so that file systems of Unix machines may be imported into Plan 9. It also includes an NFS-compatible server that runs on Plan 9, so that Plan 9 file systems may be accessed from other systems that support NFS. It includes the full suite of Internet protocols (telnet, rlogin, ftp).

INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION

  • What PC hardware works well with Plan 9?

See the Supported PC Hardware page.

Plan 9 is ported to Xen and runs well under recent versions of qemu.

VMware used to be supported, but was always problematic and the latest versions just wont work, VMware wont release the information necessary to make Plan 9 run properly on VMware, and thanks to Xen and qemu this days there is no reason to use VMware anymore. Plan 9 does work under Parallels on Mac OS X.

See http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/msg/cdd9cbdb362d2c0c and Plan9 with Parallels

See the installation instructions page.

(FIXME: should integrate into instructions page)

The installation is designed to be run from a PC.

1. Read Supported PC hardware to ensure your PC meets the requirements. 2. Back up your system. 3. Make sure you've backed up your system. 4. Read Installing the Plan 9 Distribution. 5. See the Staying up to Date page for information on how to obtain the latest fixes. 6. Here are some more questions that have been answered on the 9fans list:

IP configuration ndb/cs will set the sysname if you setup an appropriate entry in /lib/ndb/local. You must specify an ``ether='' entry, and the address should be all lower case. If all goes well, ip/ipconfig will then configure IP. Name Service If you have having problems, first check that ndb/dns is running. It needs to be started in /rc/bin/termrc or /rc/bin/cpurc. Also note that only fully qualified names are supported, and there isn't a separate resolver. Binding and Mounting Devices Note that ``#'' is the shell comment character, so you must enclose it in single quotes. For example: ``bind -a '#R6' /dev''. Auth Server When booting a cpuserver without an auth server, if you give 0.1.0.0 as the auth server address instead the cpu server's own address, you won't have to wait for it to timeout.

The stable branch is an Installation CD image at Plan 9 Additional Software page. It can be used: to install Plan 9, to directly boot the system from the CD, and to update your Plan 9 installation.

The CD image is built every day from the latest sources.

You can also use replica(1) to update your system either over the network or from a downloaded ISO.

See staying up to date.

If the VGA doesn't work, read the document Installation troubleshooting.

You'll have to find out more about the card so you can configure it. The relevant manuals are: vga(3), vgadb(6), vga(8), and 9load(8) and also see the supported PC hardware page.

Put ``debug=1'' (1st line) in plan9.ini and try again. It may not be of much help but will allow to ask a more specific question.

If you have a Radeon card, you can try Philippe Anel's Radeon Drivers.

The simplest equivalent is: ``du -a . | grep foo''. A useful variation is: ``grep foo `{du -a . | awk '{print $2}'''.

See also UNIX to Plan 9 command translation.

This is controlled by shell scripts, that are roughly equivalent to the /etc/rc files on Unix:

/rc/bin/termrc for terminals /rc/bin/cpurc for cpu servers

See cpurc(8) for more details.

For UDP services, you must start them up in the appropriate cpurc(8) file. For TCP or IL services, you must use the listen(8) daemon.

If you're using a diskless terminal or cpu server, simply turn it off. More care must be taken when running a file system, either on a dedicated file server or underneath a cpu server or terminal. Failure to do this may result in lost data.

Halt the disk by typing ``fshalt'' at a shell prompt. This will halt the file system and exit rio(1). On some systems, it will also return the console to text mode, which can make automated rebooting more reliable. See fshalt(8) (or read /rc/bin/fshalt) for details.

Then turn off the computer or type Ctl-Alt-Del (or Ctl-Alt-Reset :).

The system can be rebooted by typing ^T^Tr (two control-T's followed by ``r''). CPU servers can be rebooted by typing ^P on the console. See the cons(3) manual for more details.

For this purpose you'll need to edit plan9.ini: set up default user (terminal) ``user=<username>'' and add string like ``nobootprompt=local!#S/sdC0/fs''.

See plan9.ini(8)

GENERAL INFORMATION

  • Where did the name come from?

It was chosen in the Bell Labs tradition of selecting names that make marketeers wince. The developers also wished to pay homage to the famous Ed Wood's film, Plan 9 From Outer Space, which is about aliens who bring earthly corpses back to life.

  • Where did the names for Plan 9 components come from?

The hermeneutics of naming yields few insights. Things are named usually because the name is nice (sam), or there is some private reference hard to decode (8½), or in honour (perhaps backhanded) of another system (mothra), or an indication of expectation (Plan 9, acme), or just because (acid). None of the names tell you anything helpful.

Despite the lack of information, those who guess at reasons for naming generate volumes of apocrypha. The real reason is usually, ``because''.

The mascot of the system is white bunny Glenda.

Renee French drew Glenda.

Here is Rob Pike's 9fans answer (from 16 Sep 2003):

I can take no credit for the fonts except for having the good luck to know Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes well enough to ask them to do a deal with Bell Labs and let us use their fonts. The postscript fonts used in the manual, which are related to the screen fonts (primarily those used in acme), were the first font designed specifically for Unicode. I also rather like the screen fonts, which were also maybe the first.

The clean appearance of the screen comes mostly from laziness, but the color scheme is (obviously) deliberate. The intent was to build on an observation by Edward Tufte that the human system likes nature and nature is full of pale colors, so something you're going to look at all day might best serve if it were also in relaxing shades. Renee French helped me with the specifics of the color scheme (she's a professional illustrator and my color vision is suspect), once I'd figured out how I wanted it to look. There are still some features of the color system that I put in that I think no one has ever noticed. That's a good thing, in my opinion; the colors should fade away, if you'll pardon the expression.

Having used other systems with different approaches to color screens, most especially Windows XP (extra pukey), I think Tufte was right.

The Plan 9 release is available for free download at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/download.html. It includes source of the kernel, libraries, and commands for all supported architectures. It also includes complete binaries for the x86 architecture.

See the download wiki page.

The best way to learn about the system is to write something that other people in the Plan 9 user community could use, or to port the system to new platforms.

See the how to contribute wiki page.

- See the Papers page.

- The manual pages are at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/.

- You can find many other documents and papers in the Plan 9 section of the cat-v.org doc archive.

- See the rest of the wiki.

Geoff Collyer, geoff (at) plan9.bell-labs.com.

See the user groups and 9con page for the known user groups and events where Plan 9 can be found.

In short, 9grid is a distributed computing project, which features prominently the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. For 9grid-related questions, read separate 9grid FAQ.

See 9grid.

plan9port Is a port of most of the Plan 9 user space to Unix.

9vx A Plan 9 kernel that runs on user space using vx32.

v9fs is a 9P implementation for Linux and BSD.

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