From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <1cabc3e75f0f337a1115aaa65040d242@9srv.net> To: 9fans@9fans.net Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:15:20 -0400 From: a@9srv.net In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan 9 and multicores/parallelism/concurrency? Topicbox-Message-UUID: e4b35e5a-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 In addition to sqweek's good reply: The "distributed" part also refers to how a typical installation is structured. The system responsible for authenticating you, your file server, the cpu server you run processes on, and the terminal you're typing at may well all be distinct computers, but for the most part none of the application code knows anything about networking. The system takes care of it for you (mostly thanks to 9p, as sqweek described). In terms of concurrency, that's more of a programming question than an OS question (which isn't to say the OS isn't relevant). Plan 9's thread(2) library is probably the most relevant thing there. It follows a very different (and easier to learn, read, and write) model than the threads you see in other systems. Plan 9 mostly helps there by making things lighter, encouraging the use of multiple processes where other systems penalize it; the library itself is now available on unix through plan9port. Anthony