Re: [9fans] plan9port : complete system : kernel : freebsd || linux ?

[Ethan Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2018, at 3:41 PM, Dave MacFarlane wrote:
> What do you mean by "a complete, installable system for plan9ports"?

That's my question too!

> If you mean one that uses p9p in place of gnu utils, that's something
> I've thought about
> trying to do before, but I'd suggest taking it one step further and
> seeing if you could use
> a 9p root filesystem and see how far you can take the per process
> namespaces of Linux
> to make it feel like Plan 9. (AFAIK, that wouldn't be possible with
> NetBSD or FreeBSD, but
> I might be mistaken..)

I had a bit of a go at the shell tools side of things.  It was fun in a way, but I won't pretend the result was as usable as Plan 9, never mind Linux.  It wasn't worth continuing to the point where experimenting with per process namespaces might become interesting.  The same goes for making use of Linux's interesting clone() system call, which afaik close to rfork().

It was just an exercise.  I wasn't expecting too much out of it because I've experimented with minimal Linux before, running LFS from 2001 to 2003 and being involved with a source-based Linux distribution from 2004 to about 2009.  My conclusion was so much interesting software wants the whole bloatware circus that to do without it requires becoming a 1-man patching machine.  This goes all the way into the shell.  A surprising lot of software needs the shell to be the Bourne shell and the various utilities to have POSIX-specified options and behave in POSIX-specified ways.  P9P utilities don't do that.  I also got the idea that the days of hobbyist-maintained Linux distributions are over, that it takes a lot of dedication or a large team.  I personally resolved to use bloatware without paying too much attention to it for "modern" software, and to have my fun with what I call 'island systems' -- not existing to provide services for modern software but rather little universes in themselves.  They can be hosted or emulated, or run on old hardware, I don't care so long as they're not going to stop working or break programs I wrote at the drop of a hat.  P9P could be considered an island system in itself, old operating systems and hardware too, but my current primary choice of island system is Forth.

If, on the other hand, you basically want Plan 9, using Linux as a driver layer, there have been multiple attempts over the years, some with corporate or academic backing, but none of them seem to have worked out.  The guy behind most of them eventually moved on to writing an actual operating system influenced by Plan 9.

-- 
Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long -- Ogden Nash