Re: [9fans] Inferno on Plan9

["Brian L. Stuart" <blstuart@bellsouth.net>]

On Fri, 12/29/17, Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Dec 2017 19:11:22 +0000 "Brian L. Stuart" <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>  I'm at the same point I usually am when getting ready to teach my winter term OS
>> course.
>
> Why teach about Inferno? Just curious.

It works out to be the sweet spot where a lot of considerations come
together.  First, I like to teach OS from an internals point of view.  I
feel that one should understand how one's tools work before using
them.  Second, like a lot of people of my generation, the way I really
learned about operating systems was from Lions commentary on
6th Edition.  For years, I had been thinking about writing an OS text,
but had been teaching from Tanenbaum using MINIX.  It was getting
somewhat problematic in the days when no one was running VMs
for everything and students were getting to where they didn't know
how to partition drives and run other OSs.  Then when Vita Nuova
released the Inferno source, it was like all the pieces fell into place.
It's well-written and carries a lot of the same ideas as Plan 9.  Students
don't have to allocate any extra hardware or even configure a VM.
It's small and simple enough that we can cover all the major elements
of it as well as the general principles in one term.  But they're able
to get some exposure to the internals of a real system and not just
something created for illustrative purposes.

With the ubiquity of VMs these days, a good argument could be
made for using Plan 9 in a VM for the course.  Maybe someday
I'll look at adding Plan 9 chapters to the book, but at least for now,
I'm finding Inferno works quite well.

BLS