Re: [9fans] FreeBSD 4.0 / Plan9 3rd ed.

[lucio@proxima.alt.za]

> Is anybody working on connecting stuff for these 2 OS's?  Plan9

I was, while in Cape Town.  When I got back to my office in
Johannesburg, I gave Alef priority.  Now that Alef is on ice pending
some feedback, I guess I should go back to the IL/9P port.  I left
some of the ground work behind and inaccessible, but the important
details have come back with me.

> contains a patch for FreeBSD-3.2 which adds IL protocol.  I had a
> first look at the patch.  It seems to be in conflict with the IPv6,
> but mostly the patch can easily fixed, except...  I don't understand
> the stuff not enough to make it go.  But I think, IL support should be
> integrated into official FreeBSD.
> 
I think I have a good handle on it.  The Stevens books will no doubt
help a lot.  My efforts are towards a port to NetBSD (which moves more
slowly than FreeBSD, and is a little divergent) but by the time I'm
finished, I hope to produce results for all the *BSDs.  I leave it to
someone with a stronger stomach to deal with Linux.

> Neither I had success with drawterm.  It seems to depend on
> Linux-style threads not available on my system.  Is it worth (will it
> work?)  to add linuxthreads port to the system?

The POSIX threads are standard across most (all?)  modern Unixes.
They need installing (I have no doubt there's a pthread/MIT-pthread
port for FreeBSD) and didn't quite seem to suffice to get drawterm to
run under NetBSD, but I haven't dug any deeper - those are really
murky waters.

I would dearly like to share ideas with others that want to integrate
Plan 9 into other environments as I do.  There are lots of options,
and too few objectives that would make it easier to choose a
particular path.

++L