Re: [9fans] old Brazil paper

[FJ Ballesteros <nemo@plan9.escet.urjc.es>]

Using google I found this:

Abstracts
(Added as they become available)

Brazil
Rob Pike

With Plan 9 in production use, for example as the provider of Internet 
directory service for AT&T 800 numbers, operating systems research in 
our center has moved to a new system, called Brazil. Research topics 
being addressed in Brazil center on higher-performance machines and, 
particularly, networks. A new in-house 300 megabit/s switched fiber 
network increases the potential bandwidth between machines by at least 
an order of magnitude; our aim is to realize and exploit that bandwidth. 
The overall design is to eliminate unnecessary overhead, particularly by 
restructuring and redesigning where necessary to avoid copying data from 
element to element along the communications path. For example, the 
graphics model of the system has been completely replaced. Brazil uses a 
data-based model in which applications transmit graphical udpates as 
rectangular blocks of pixels to be written directly to the screen or 
window, rather than the traditional description of how to draw the 
update. This unifies traditional user interfaces and video at the lowest 
levels of the system, which, coupled with the model of the file name 
space inherited from Plan 9, makes it possible to display video on the 
display under control of the window system but without the window system 
needing to touch the data: the application can drive the display 
directly. Most of this software (except the operating system kernel) is 
written in a new concurrent systems programming language, Alef, which 
makes it easy to write multi-process servers and applications that can 
communicate using messages or shared memory, as appropriate.