[9fans] Any significant gotchas?

["John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.jdyson.com>]

As some of you'all *might* know, I like playing with
OSes...  Any major gotchas in a planned booting
of plan9 on my SMP box? :-).  (Dell Precision 620,
dual 866 Xeon, with 1GB.)

Over the last few years, I have been planning to do
a fully distributed kernel.  It seems that plan9 might
be the best, common, at least semi-free entry in the
market -- and I just don't have the energy to do a
whole effort myself.  Even though it isn't EXACTLY
what I have been planning, it seems to be a reasonable
alternate 'opinion' that I could adopt.

How do you like plan9 (primarily as an experimental,
education or even useful) tool?  I have been intriqued
by it, only primary worry so far would be scalability
and other such issues (from my outside viewpoint.)

Do you guys think that it would be worthwhile to invest
serious time on upgrading and improving the kernel for
large scale usage (on a per-cpu basis.)  Has it improved
alot over the last few years so that an effort isn't
even appropriate?  (I have NO need or desire for private
use of my work, and plan to donate everything back for
review and potential incorporation, as the powers that
be see fit.)

Thanks for your input, and I really look forward to playing
with and investigating this very interesting OS entry.  Hopefully,
I'll be booting Plan9 in the next day or so.  It does seem
that Plan9 has been slowly (and lately more quickly) taking
off, since the license has been made more favorable.  (Please,
no license advocacy, there are other places for that :-)).

John