I have used gentoo extensively and plan9 for a few years now as well, and this concept of "namespaces" for processes is a confusing but interesting concept. maybe you could use grsec to limit the access to gentoo's "file system" at a per-process level. This would be somewhat similar to what plan9 does, but you'd have to also find a good way to bind a directory elsewhere in the tree at a per-process level, unified with what was already there (aka, hopefully NOT like mount -o bind). This is only the tip of the iceberg; plan9 does this per-process filesystem namespacing to set up a good environment for a system which adheres to the orginal unix "philosophies" such as, everything has a "file" to represent it. linux does this well for data on the disk, device nodes, and whatever gets put in /proc. it does not do this, generally, for something like an email message. a good plan9 program, however, is likely to do this.
as an example of the power of this concept, `% topng < /dev/screen > screenshot.png' will use the relatively simple program topng to convert the file /dev/screen into the file screenshot.png. One major difference is X11. In plan9, the system handles the graphics more directly. network export of windows is handled differently. it might be interesting to make a rio for linux which draws directly to /dev/fb0. Or it might be better to convert /dev/fb0 to a /dev/screen on linux, even in userspace, and then more or less use rio for plan9. performance might be an issue, but plan9 people are still waiting on 3d graphics if they even care enough to wait...
-Eli
On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Jack Johnson <knapjack@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 8:29 AM, dexen deVries <dexen.devries@gmail.com> wrote:
> disclaimer: i'm not a plan 9 person for any viable value of `p9 person'
I'm in the same boat, but I aspire to be in the other boat. :)