From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Glendix?
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:26:48 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20071113162642.1E4CA1E8C1F@holo.morphisms.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <47396E4D.6020005@kix.in>
> 1) Modify the Linux kernel to present a 9P interface to itself (too
> hard, almost like re-writing several important parts of the kernel)
> 2) Modify the Plan 9 userspace to work with POSIX (Yuck, and Plan9Port
> already does this)
> 3) Create a custom INIT process which will be responsible for providing
> all the "plan 9 kernelish" features that userspace programs expect (for
> eg. providing the /net directory), so that all of them can run unmodified.
As Forsyth says, this may not be such a great final-year project,
especially if you have only two months in which to do the work.
That said again, I don't think any of the three strategies above would
really make Linux feel like Plan 9. For example, I should be able to
"9fs sources" and then run the Unix ls or the Gnome file browser
or whatever on /n/sources and have it work.
To really make it feel like Plan 9, you'd first want to write a binary
format driver (in Linux) for Plan 9's a.out binaries. Then you can
load Plan 9 binaries directly. That much is pretty simple.
Next, you'd want to implement the Plan 9 system calls as an "alternate
personality" for the Linux kernel, to be used when running the Plan 9
binaries. Some of the system calls are fairly easy -- open, read, write,
close, stat, wstat -- but bind / mount will require:
- per-process name spaces accessible to normal users
(CLONE_NEWNS is only available to root, but you can
probably reuse some or all of the code)
- letting normal users do 9p mounts anywhere in their
own name space (can probably use v9fs here)
Also rfork, notes, etc. will require a little bit of work,
but they're straightforward.
Once you've got that, then the icing on the cake would be doing
things like writing a /net for Linux and then rewriting the socket
calls to do user space file operations on /net. Then you could
do things like
import othermachine /net
firefox
Also the missing /proc files and so on.
Russ
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2007-11-13 16:26 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 53+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2007-11-13 9:28 Anant Narayanan
2007-11-13 10:05 ` Gorka Guardiola
2007-11-13 10:14 ` Uriel
2007-11-13 10:33 ` Gorka Guardiola
2007-11-13 14:25 ` David Leimbach
2007-11-14 0:51 ` Alexander Sychev
2007-11-13 21:37 ` Joel C. Salomon
2007-11-13 10:17 ` Charles Forsyth
2007-11-13 10:39 ` roger peppe
2007-11-13 10:47 ` Anant Narayanan
2007-11-13 12:18 ` Uriel
2007-11-13 13:00 ` erik quanstrom
2007-11-13 13:31 ` Uriel
2007-11-13 13:47 ` roger peppe
2007-11-13 14:10 ` sqweek
2007-11-13 13:54 ` Charles Forsyth
2007-11-13 15:20 ` Anant Narayanan
2007-11-13 18:23 ` Bakul Shah
2007-11-13 14:26 ` erik quanstrom
2007-11-13 16:49 ` Uriel
2007-11-13 17:19 ` erik quanstrom
2007-11-13 17:24 ` Iruata Souza
2007-11-13 22:01 ` David Leimbach
2007-11-13 15:16 ` Anant Narayanan
2007-11-13 14:29 ` Anant Narayanan
2007-11-13 17:21 ` erik quanstrom
2007-11-13 21:41 ` Joel C. Salomon
2007-11-13 13:30 ` John Stalker
2007-11-13 15:35 ` Harri Haataja
2007-11-13 16:22 ` John Stalker
2007-11-13 16:43 ` Aki Nyrhinen
2007-11-13 16:39 ` Uriel
2007-11-13 16:46 ` Iruata Souza
2007-11-13 18:02 ` Charles Forsyth
2007-11-13 18:12 ` Iruata Souza
2007-11-13 22:04 ` David Leimbach
2007-11-13 22:16 ` David Leimbach
2007-11-13 23:19 ` Iruata Souza
2007-11-14 2:23 ` R
2007-11-14 11:44 ` Iruata Souza
2007-11-14 12:17 ` R
2007-11-14 12:40 ` Christian Kellermann
2007-11-14 13:01 ` R
2007-11-14 13:08 ` Christian Kellermann
2007-11-13 17:48 ` John Stalker
2007-11-13 16:26 ` Russ Cox [this message]
2007-11-13 16:42 ` Charles Forsyth
2007-11-13 17:44 ` Latchesar Ionkov
2007-11-14 5:44 ` ron minnich
2007-11-16 8:42 ` [9fans] Nine4Linux [WAS: Glendix?] Enrico Weigelt
2007-11-16 10:20 ` erik quanstrom
[not found] ` <1b69251dfdcb6b8022ff78767f07ce86@quanstro.net>
2007-11-22 18:01 ` Enrico Weigelt
2007-11-22 22:00 ` Paweł Lasek
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