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

[Alexander Viro viro@math.psu.edu]

On Tue, 9 May 2000, Roman V. Shaposhnick wrote:

> On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 12:12:52PM -0400, Russ Cox wrote:
> > 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
>
>   We hope to get the similar thing in Linux. A lot of work
> has been done at a kernel level already, but the real problem
> is userspace. Thus, I guess that from 2.4 Linux will be an
> ideal environment to do that kind of porting.

Heh ;-) Three sets of patches before we get proper namespaces. Kernel
_does_ support everything needed  right now, I'll just have to merge
union-mount patch and add a new flag to clone(2) (==rfork()). BTW, the
last set fed into the tree (hopefully to be there in pre7-7) includes the
equivalent of bind(2) and support for disjoint mount trees.

So you will get namespaces - I didn't look too deep into the porting that
work to 4.4, but for Linux the thing is coming. And it's cleaner than
1995 vintage Plan 9 one - e.g. our design handles ".." for any mount
graphs in the right way, ditto for pwd, etc. I'ld love to compare the
thing with current Plan 9 stuff - hopefully during the USENIX. So if
anybody is interested...