[9fans] 9pm/Plan 9 kernel in user space

[jorge-plan9@magma.com.ni]

Hello!

I'm very new to Plan 9, just installed three or so Inferno's, a PC
with Plan 9 and a QEMU instance under Linux with Plan 9.

As a systems/network administrator in a small software company I'm
interested in simple mainenance and setup of file shares in a
heterogeneous environment: Linux, Windows, some BSD's,...

9P2000, fossil and venti look great to me in this respect, however
there are lots of missing pieces to get a pure 9P driven environment
working, especially on the MS-Windows side.

While playing around with Plan 9 and Inferno at home, and with OpenVZ
at work, the idea struck me, that with the Plan 9 Kernel it should be
"easy" to write IO drivers which make use of a hosting OS-Environment,
e.g. Linux. and load the Kernel into use space: simulate hard disks
with Linux block devices, the console with character devices, the
screen with the VirtualConsole, a VNC-framebuffer or an X11-Windows,
etc.

Such a Plan 9 would be much faster then QEMU, probably very portable
to any Unix-derivate, and I could run as much of them as I liked, just
with OpenVZ.

I found out in http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/9pm/README that such a
thing had once be done under Windows, and tried to compile the
provided sources with my QEMU Plan 9, however failed to get over the
very first hoops:

    cl -c nologo -W3 ....   
    cl: '/bin/cl'file does not exists
    ... etc.

Is there a chance to get this "Windows hosted" Plan 9 implementation
compiled and running these days?  Can it reasonable be used to create
a "Linux/Unix" hosted Plan 9 Kernel?

Thanks for all, to bring in a fresh wind into the OS-Scene,

Regards,

        Jorge-Len

P.S.: ahh - and: how about 9P Clients and Servers for MS-Win*?