Re: [9fans] heterogeneous cpu servers?

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

There's not a lot to say about cpu.  The best 
explanation of what's going on is section 5 of the
manual (the 9P descriptions).  Clients connect
to cpu servers and after an initial handshake
the clients turn into 9P servers, serving the
terminal's entire namespace.  The cpu server
then mounts this service on /mnt/term, binds 
/mnt/term/dev/cons* into /dev, and then executes
a shell with input/output redirected to/from /dev/cons.

Two years ago I wrote such a server for Unix.
It had a user-level implementation of a 9P mux,
it "mounted" the client connection in memory, connected fd 0,1,2
to pipes to processes ferrying the appropriate data to/from
/dev/cons, and exec'ed a shell.  It was neat but
not useful, since it did nothing more than ssh does.

Instead, it sounds like all you need to do is run
ssh or telnet or con in an acme win to connect to
your Unix box and run javac in that window.  It's
not as elegant as the native setup, but it's mostly
what you'd have with a cpu-style connection.

Combine that with running u9fs and you should be
all set.  If you don't want to run u9fs as an
rhosts-style daemon (e.g., you're not behind a 
firewall), I have some diffs to u9fs that let you
run a personal one within an ssh session.

I did some jini development using such a setup
last spring and it was quite pleasant.  I think
that the java compiler already outputs plumbable
error messages.

Russ