Re: [9fans] Is Plan 9 C "Less Dangerous?"

[Chris McGee <newton688@gmail.com>]

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> What one wants is Plan 9 as a
> model for what may be a family of hardware APIs. It makes sense to
> promote massive parallelism, but the API to it should be sufficiently
> simple for a single individual to manage.
>

This is the what I wonder about. Is this possible at the hardware level and
still support an equally simple, understandable, yet capable, software
system on top? By extension, would Plan 9 would run on such a system or if
it would require some fundamental changes to adapt to it. For example, does
C really need to be thrown out or can it be revised.


> Most computing devices today are single-user, even those like my new
> Android phone that offer shared user capabilities. Incidentally, the
> authorisation model in this case is inadequate for my purpose (share
> with a pre-teen).
>

I am in this boat too, however I have a general aversion to cloud computing
and so I would need some household multi-user systems for data storage and
heavy processing tasks or some distributed equivalent.


> So we have layers and we need the complexity to be shoved into
> well-tested, sealed boxes that can be trusted, while the surface
> remains as simple as 9P.
>

My trouble is that I don't trust the sealed boxes anymore after Meltdown,
Spectre, Rowhammer, etc. Perhaps simple and auditable hardware might help
with this.

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