[9fans] Plan 9 future (Was: Re: Are the Infernospaces gone?)

[Russ Cox rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com]

	for portability to other operating systems, does this imply
	that other important libraries, on which most applications
	in plan9 rely, have also been ported?

Libbio and some of the C library has been ported
(see the Newsqueak distribution on Rob's home page).

Unless someone beats me to it, I have plans of
trying to get much of what's left ported this
summer; a friend here at school is also interested,
so it has a decent chance of happening.
Part of those plans include tidying up a
new ``libXg'', as discussed before (or maybe
on sam-fans; I forget).

	I guess key here would be the namespace interface and tools
	(because there is already a port of 9p to *nix?).

	[ hence my original comment about "9spaces" or some such ]

Many of the tools stand without the per-process
namespaces.  That's why I think the ported libraries
would be useful.  It's not clear to me how to implement
something like 9spaces usefully.  As Dave mentioned,
Dong has built 9P support into FreeBSD, and now
we know someone is doing one for Linux too.  But there's
still no per-process namespace.  I started something
akin to what you've been calling 9spaces a while
back, and it worked fine for a single process, but
that's not particularly interesting.  Many of the reasons
you would want a ``9spaces'' is to get some of the
more interesting tools, which rely heavily not only
on mounting 9P services but on having per-process
namespaces (e.g. rio or acme).  You just can't
pull off the namespace sharing across a fork/exec in
user space.  And supporting them in the kernel
opens up a new class of security and other problems.

I just don't see how to do 9spaces without ending
up with Plan 9 in Unix's clothing.  Taste aside, that's
an enormous amount of work.

Russ