Re: [9fans] novel userspace paradigms introduced by plan 9

[Connor Lane Smith <cls@lubutu.com>]

Hey,

On 2 July 2011 19:36, dexen deVries <dexen.devries@gmail.com> wrote:
> linux'c `clone()' syscall (the underpinnings of fork()) actually do accept
> CLONE_NEWNS, CLONE_NEWNET, CLONE_VM and other flags, pretty close to p9's.

Yeah, clone() is afaik compatible with rfork(), so long as you have
CAP_SYS_ADMIN. Similarly mount() and bind().

> afaik, x11 is considered an afterthought, bolted onto POSIX systems, and thus
> not integrated all that well.

I think what I'd say is the most "novel userspace paradigm" in Plan 9
is its pervasive synthetic filesystems. You have FTP filesystems and
so on with FUSE now, but writing something as flexible (technically)
as Rio still requires something other than FUSE. But more importantly,
since Plan 9 *started* with those synthetic filesystems they're used
everywhere, whereas they're pretty uncommon in Linux etc. It would be
nice if web browsers used a kind of webfs, and so on.

It's unfortunate that clients for dedicated filesystems, like Rio and
Acme, need to understand the layout of the directory tree, but that's
difficult to work around. Still, FUSE has extended attributes, so you
could e.g. configure a window manager just by setting attributes on
the 'window manager filesystem' root directory.

I know bloated GNU projects are generally frowned upon, but I think
it's quite interesting that GNOME's GVFS allows, afaict, per-process
synthetic filesystems. But clearly that's extremely ugly compared to
Plan 9.

On 3 July 2011 00:31, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX)
<lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> Have you read the source code for their cat(1) ???

You know Linux != GNU, right?

cls