[9fans] Re: plan 9 and multiboot

[Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>]

Thanks to everyone for all the info. I'll pass it along.

I have this to say as to my view about single OS use. It certainly isn't
the norm for me. I'm a practicing engineer and between work and home I
switch between about 20 OS'es every day.

I'd say that if you find everything you need in a single OS then you
aren't pushing the envelope very hard. Whether you like it or not the
ability to co-exist with other OS'es on the same drive (preferably ala
VMWare so they run concurrently) is a requirement of a modern OS. And when
one talks about 'distributed computing' there is an inherent assumption of
heterogenious environments. It's the interface to the system that must be
compatible, not the system itself. Treat the OS as an object, thunking
layer.

Plan 9 could be much more popular if it had process and file deamons that
ran on other OS'es, p2p and bidirectional. It would be more popular and
more useful if it ran in VMWare. This would allow the user the ability to
have the OS'es executing in parallel with cut-n-paste.

On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, William Staniewicz wrote:

> Several times a day I switch effortlessly between my
> Plan9 and FreeBSD/Win95 partitions. I use the floppy
> most of the time to get back into Plan9 but have no
> problem with the boot loaders.
> 
> Bill
> 
> > Having been pointed at the docs, you have to go
> > out of your way to be compliant, so, as predicted,
> > the Plan 9 PC kernels are not.
> > 
> > It doesn't seem worth running after, either, since
> > our PC boot process depends on 9load doing things like
> > putting plan9.ini in memory somewhere for us.  So the
> > "kernel" that a multiboot booter would be handed would
> > really be 9load, and it just seems ridiculously complicated.
> > 
> > As far as coexisting with other PC operating systems,
> > which is a broader issue, Plan 9 is perfectly happy to
> > sit within its own partition.  If you mark the partition
> > active, it boots.  If you have another boot loader like
> > NTLDR or LILO jump to that partition, it should boot,
> > although I haven't tried recently.
> > 
> > Russ
>