From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <13426df10612101252h46468208v19cfd943287daddf@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2006 13:52:30 -0700 From: "ron minnich" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: Again: (self)hosted Plan9? Was: [9fans] extending xen to allow In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <457A39B0.1080709@andrew.cmu.edu> Topicbox-Message-UUID: eef4649c-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 12/9/06, Steve Simon wrote: > I am keen enough to try and get some hardware documentation, and maybe > even have a go at codeing a/some drivers for plan9. This is great. All these hardware driver ideas are fine. But lacking a few other bits, i still believe that all the drivers in the world are not going to be sufficient. I don't even thinks they are necessary to get people going. Put it this way. I have a nice web page served out of a Plan 9 system that shows google maps data etc. I can't view it on Plan 9. What we have here, is failure to communicate. Drivers won't help this problem. So what we're trying to do is give people a path from the linux world to a better place. The idea is that you'll get a linux kernel as a device driver. You can even do driver development on Plan 9 in this world if all works out. The linux kernel will simply ignore the existence of a piece of hardware; Plan 9 will own it. Over time, more and more bits can be moved to the Plan 9 domain, until at some point, we realize that on that particular system, we don't need Linux at all -- and it vanishes in a puff of smoke and mirrors. This will be way less extensive than xen-knoppix, which is a full distro more or less. We don't need X11 -- Aki has got drawterm working on /dev/fb. Systems get pretty peppy once x11 is out of the picture. We've realized that we need python to run xen, so one thing we might do is remove all of gnubin and just have a few .py utililties, so as to minimize the amount of junk we need to have on the linux dom0 partition. If you have python (NOT that I want it; but you can't avoid Python and XML RPC in Xen, sigh), and you can import os, it's hard to see why you want all the gnubin junk. How many implementations of cat do you need, really? For apps, you can run a linux app in a window under VNC. Aki has plumbing working between the two worlds. So our browser for now is the "light" firefox with its slim-waisted 200 MBYTE footprint. Think of this stuff as analogous to the V5 JCL command, or the GECOS field in /etc/passwd; a way to get by until you can cut the cords to the old-style, primitive environment. And you only use that environment in a batch mode ... So, for those of you who don't wish to write drivers, there's still a large number of us who would appreciate a web browser ... and abiword or similar or .... thanks ron p.s. Aki leaves in a week, and we're all very sad here. He was on a training assigment, and unfortunately did not train us as much as we had hoped. But, hope springs ever anew ... any students wishing to spend some time here training us are most welcome to! Note that it's easier for me to set up if you are a .us, but hey, Aki is from Finland and we still managed it, even though he doesn't speak Linux.