Re: [9fans] Plan9 topology

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

> I see! I mis-understood what you meant by "Plan 9
> terminal". I thought
> that the Plan 9 Live CD gave you a choice of either
> installing the
> Plan 9 server or a Plan 9 client/terminal. I now see that
> that there
> are terminals available on various OSes to connect to a
> Plan 9
> server.

It has become a little confusing over
the last 20 years.  In a way too brief
way, here are the basic incarnations of
Plan9:

- Natively running the current Plan9 kernel
   - Stand-alone terminal with its own fs
   - Terminal (possibly diskless) talking
     to an external fs
   - CPU, auth, or file server (or some
     combination)
   All of these are running Plan9 as their
   "bare metal" OS
- Same as above but in a virtual machine,
  such as virtualbox, vmware, qemu, etc.
- Ken's FS: a file server that runs on
  bare hardware
- 9vx: a port of the Plan9 kernel to vx32
  that allows a full Plan9 system to run
  as a user-level application on another
  system, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX
- drawterm: an earlier port of a limited
  Plan9 kernel that's similar to a terminal
  connecting to a remote CPU server
- P9P (aka Plan9 ports, Plan9 from user
  space): a port of the Plan9 user apps
  to POSIX-like systems
And just for fun these can all play together.
At the moment, I'm using a MacOS machine
that has one file system mounted using
the P9P 9pfuse program.  It's also running
an instance of virtualbox that's net booted
a Plan9 terminal.  There's also an instance
of 9vx running which is accessing the file
system mounted via P9P.  All of these pieces
are talking to a Plan9 CPU server which
in turn uses a Ken FS file server.

>  I did see that `wily', an
> Linux ACME
> clone is available. Guess what I did? :)

I remember playing with wily quite a lot
a while back.  With Russ's P9P port of
acme, though, you can run the real acme
as a Linux app too.

> I just checked - it's a 166Mhz P-I with 98M RAM and 4.5G
> HDD. Made a
> good dedicated mail server. May not have enough gonads for
> a Plan 9
> server though.

I wouldn't dismiss it entirely.  My old
Plan9 CPU/auth/file server at home had
a very similar configuration.

BLS