We hope to show the operating system Plan 9 from Bell Labs at the NLUUG spring conference 2005.

We intend to give an impression of what Plan 9 is, and what (in our opinion) its strong points (and maybe also its less strong points) are. In accordance with the theme of the spring conference, we hope to be able to give an overview of how Plan 9 ``does'' email, but we do not intend to limit ourselves to that. :-) We will bring some machines for demo, and some papers to browse, and maybe some demo/install cd's for those interested enough to give it a try.

Those interested enough to give it a ``test drive'' may do so by firing up a ``live cd'' (image downloadable from the Plan 9 page, link below), or by requesting an account on one or more of the public access Plan 9 installations, and downloading the Plan 9 remote desktop tool ``drawterm(8)'' for graphical access.

Developed by the people who devised UNIX and C at Bell Labs, Plan 9 takes OS development back into the realm of research. While UNIX can be said to be a research tool the OS principles remain largely the same throughout all developments. Plan 9 is an attempt to work on the operating system concepts from the ground up, reworking the whole idea using modern technology.

It is difficult to say in only a few words what Plan 9 offers over Unix. For me, the main feature is _integration_, on many levels, giving us an integrated, distributed system, potentially on heterogeneous hardware, in which we have unified and transparent access to the resources available on the machines in the system. For example (in more or less random order):

Integration of maintenance.

• All files live on a central file server; an authentication server takes care of checking a user's credentials; disk-less cpu-servers provide processing power; disk-less terminals (simple machines with graphical screen, keyboard and mouse) provide user access to the system, but contain no ``state'' -- all ``state'' (all that may need to be updated, maintained) is kept on the file-server (data) and on the authentication server (user administration). That said, it is very well possible to run Plan 9 on a single machine, even though running a multi-machine set-up is more interesting.

Integrated access to the past.

• The usual file servers for data storage have integrated backup facilities that allow transparent access to the files as they were yesterday, or one year ago, or... Apart from the direct use -- oops, edited this file and now it's worse than yesterday's version, let's retry using that one, we can easily get at it using a command well-name yesterday(1) -- it also provides historical information, for example The nightly snapshots of the Plan 9 kernel from February 27, 1990 to March 25, 2003 give an interesting view into the Plan 9 development process.

Integrated/unified access to resources, both local and remote.

• All resources are uniformly (even more than in Unix) acessable via the file system interface (open, read, write, close, etc. -- no ioctl, if necessary, the interface to a resources is provided via multiple files, e.g. one for data, another to read/write control messages). A network file protocol, 9P, offers remote access to resources (the absence of ioctl makes this really transparent). This allows Plan 9 to have commands that are similar in nature to ssh and NFS but provide better integration between the local and remote system and work more transparently. To provide access to a new resource, it is sufficient to write a file server for it, that dynamically serves the interface files that provide access to the resource, like /proc in Unix. Such file servers typically run in user space.
• A particular remote resource is the sources file server at bell labs on which the ``current'' version of Plan 9 is always available (together with its past). The usual procedure to update one's Plan 9 installation -- replica(1) -- simply mounts the sources and copies over the files that have been added or changed since the last update. To see what has changed one can simply run diff to compare local files with those on the sources file server.

Integration of heterogenous hardware.

• Each Plan 9 system has cross compilers for all supported architectures. Doing cross-compilation is as simple as setting an environment variable to indicate the target architecture before starting a build. A simple naming scheme allows object files, executables and libraries for multiple architectures to live together on a single system. Per-process namespaces and union-mount and bind allow for a uniform view of the system: /bin/ls always is the program to list files, indepent from the architecture on which it is run.

Integrated single-signon.

• The program ``factotum(4)'' acts as the authentication agent and key manager for a user. In combination with the ``secure (file) storage'' server for persistent, secure, storage of keys (also accessed via ``secstore(1)'') this gives one single-signon for the authentication protocols supported by factotum.

More information can be found at:

• The Plan 9 page: distribution (freely available under lucent public license), papers, documentation, etc.
• Plan 9 Wiki: information pertinent to installing, configuring, and using plan 9, but also what people do like about plan 9.

Plan 9 ideas are being brought to Unix variants (Solaris, *BSD, Linux, ...) for example in the following projects:

• v9fs: 9P clients, servers and tools for Linux and *BSD.
• Plan 9 from User Space (aka plan9port): A port of the bulk of the Plan 9 software to Unix, including libraries and tools.

Inferno is a spin-off project that provides a compact operating system designed for building distributed and networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms based on the same concepts and technologies as Plan 9. Inferno can be run ``hosted'' on top of Windows and many Unix variants, or even as plug-in in some webbrowser, or ``natively'' on the bare hardware.

One application of the Plan 9 ideas worth mentioning here is the 9grid where one uses the distributed nature of Plan 9 to do grid computing without needing specific grid toolkits - the basic features already present in Plan 9 suffice.

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This page is linked from the NLUUG Voorjaarsconferentie 2005 page.