From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan 9
From: "rob pike" <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com>
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Date: Fri,  2 Nov 2001 08:53:18 -0500
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> To repeat: Plan 9 has a nifty idea of making mount tables per-process,
> and as a result gets huge benefits across the board.  But why stop
> there?  Why should not *all* links (instead of just some) be a
> per-process matter?

Any 'link' can be per-process in Plan 9, but in practice only those ones
that need to be are invested with the trouble to make them so. Otherwise,
I would have to write down somewhere what all the default links would
be for a process when it starts running, and that would be a huge
list of information and also unpredictable since I can't say what resources
the process is likely to need dynamically.  It seems both much simpler
and just as general to let the file system set the defaults with its directory
structure and override them for the relatively small number of cases
needed, which is exactly what Plan 9 does.

In other words, in Plan 9 all links *can* be per-process but only those
that *need* to be actually are.  Why do it differently?

Or perhaps I don't understand what you're asking.

-rob