[9fans] General question about hosted interfaces

[9fans] General question about hosted interfaces

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

What is it, apart from someone having to do the work, that would prevent
the above-device-level portion of Plan 9, perhaps Inferno's emu, running
on top of a UNIX system (or even Windows, gasp), with the hosted-Plan-9
first importing the UNIX /-rooted file system globally then overlay-
mounting the hosted-Plan-9 specific parts of the name space?  I.e. true
rio, acme, etc. for people who are not in a position to control the
choice of operating system.

I know that would introduce inefficiencies in the data paths, but that
is not necessarily a fatal problem.

Re: [9fans] General question about hosted interfaces

[Lucio De Re]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 03:17:57PM +0000, Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:
>
> What is it, apart from someone having to do the work, that would prevent
> the above-device-level portion of Plan 9, perhaps Inferno's emu, running
> on top of a UNIX system (or even Windows, gasp), with the hosted-Plan-9
> first importing the UNIX /-rooted file system globally then overlay-
> mounting the hosted-Plan-9 specific parts of the name space?  I.e. true
> rio, acme, etc. for people who are not in a position to control the
> choice of operating system.
>
Isn't that largely what drawterm does?

> I know that would introduce inefficiencies in the data paths, but that
> is not necessarily a fatal problem.

Oh, yes, it does! :-)

Funny, I'd like it the other way: have all the nice features of the
Plan 9 infrastructure and throw the ugly Unix toys above it, simply
because they exist, and people are so used to them, they don't realise
they can live without them.

Like Doom (or is it Quake?), Word, Netscape, to name a few.

++L

Re: [9fans] General question about hosted interfaces

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Lucio De Re wrote:
> Isn't that largely what drawterm does?

I don't think so.  Can I use drawterm to run rio, acme, etc.
without the aid of a separate system running a Plan 9 kernel?

> Funny, I'd like it the other way: have all the nice features of the
> Plan 9 infrastructure and throw the ugly Unix toys above it, ...

Remember, the constraint I was addressing is when the actual
OS (direct hardware control) is predetermined (and not Plan 9).

Don't think that such an environment has only "down" sides;
consider that at least using Windows support for all those
PC devices (graphics cards etc.) isn't such a problem,
because somebody else will be taking care of that anyway.
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Organization: University of Bath Computing Services, UK
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--
Dennis Davis, BUCS, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
D.H.Davis@bath.ac.uk

[9fans] Re: General question about hosted interfaces

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

> What is it, apart from someone having to do the work, that would
> prevent the above-device-level portion of Plan 9, perhaps Inferno's
> emu, running on top of a UNIX system (or even Windows, gasp), with
> the hosted-Plan-9 first importing the UNIX /-rooted file system
> globally then overlay- mounting the hosted-Plan-9 specific parts of
> the name space?  I.e. true rio, acme, etc. for people who are not in
> a position to control the choice of operating system.

 From your later posts I understand you'd like to run Plan 9 on the same
machine and at the same time as another OS.  Has anyone tried to run
Plan 9 on one of the virtual machine products?  Plex86 runs quite a few
OS now.

    http://www.plex86.org/info.phtml
    http://www.vmware.com/products/


Ralph.