On Mon, Oct 8, 2018, 17:15 Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 08 Oct 2018 19:03:49 -0400 Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > plan9 is breathtakingly elegant, but this is in no small part because as
> a
> > research system it had the luxury of simply ignoring many thorny problems
> > that would have marred that beauty but that the developers chose not to
> > tackle. Some of these problems have non-trivial domain complexity and,
> > while "modern" systems are far too complex by far, that doesn't mean that
> > all solutions can be recast as elegantly simple pearls in the plan9
> style.
>
> One thing I have mused about is recasting plan9 as a
> microkernel and pushing out a lot of its kernel code into user
> mode code.  It is already half way there -- it is basically a
> mux for 9p calls, low level device drivers, VM support & some
> process related code.  Such a redesign can be made more secure
> and more resilient.  The kind of problems you mention are
> easier to fix in user code. Different application domains may
> have different needs which are better handled as optional user
> mode components.
>
> Said another way, keep the good parts of the plan9 design and
> reachitect/reimplement the kernel + essential drivers/usermode
> daemons.  This is unlikely to happen (without some serious
> funding) but still fun to think about!  If done, this would be
> a more radical departure than Oberon-7 compared to Oberon but
> in the same spirit.
>

I've mused about that also. My problem has been finding the time. I think
it would be a worthwhile project.

Not entirely unrelated, I've been tinkering with seL4.

>