Re: [9fans] Which thing was harder for u to grasp relating Plan 9?

["David Leimbach" <leimy2k@gmail.com>]

On 7/11/06, Francisco J Ballesteros <nemo@lsub.org> wrote:
> I´m writing a book for the introductory course in OS at urjc, that
> we teach using Plan 9. Most of it is a a lot of generic introductory
> stuff about the system.
>
> I´d love to know the top-10 of "hard-to-get" concepts about the system,
> specially for new comers,
> to try to cover them.
>
> thanks a lot in any case.
>

You might consider talking about filesystems and read/write as RPC
mechanisms.  I don't think people really got that or get that today.

Look at FreeBSD with it's blahctl programs for every device.  Having
the ability to talk to a mounted file for control simplifies a lot of
things.

Might want to compare such a concept to /proc on linux though I think
they even overcomplicated /proc there.  (see the miscellaneous binary
format support that's available)

A potentially good example about the power of the filesystem as a
control interface would probably be burning a CD in Plan 9.  That
could cover a lot of "neat stuff" like the 9660srv program.

I had fun playing with eia serial access and control myself at home too.

Also, there was my experience trying to add an option to Rio to deal
with the fact that I didn't like the labels I was getting for "rio in
rio" sessions.  Russ Cox straightened me out, and I got to throw away
some new C code I didn't really want to maintain anyway.

http://mordor.tip9ug.jp/who/leimy/session.html

That was a very enightening experience for me.  A lot more system
behavior could be changed through the filesystem and new applications
of things like /dev/null than I had actually imagined.  It was a real
brain-stretcher.  (not a gurney... that's linux).

Dave