Re: [9fans] porting from vs. porting to Plan 9

[ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Brantley Coile wrote:

> <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
> > I'd still rather work with a real plan 9 kernel. There's so much
> > baggage in Linux I don't want to deal with. I would rather put my
> > efforts into making plan 9 a bigger deal.
>
> Can this be done without having to make a branch of the Linux kernel?

I was not doing it as a branch, but as a module. Part of the fun was it
really made me think more about how Plan 9 has to do things -- so it was
educational. I had trivial instances of bind etc. trivially working for
trivial things, but then I was able to stop ...

I only did this when I despaired of seeing the license change. That's been
fixed.

The goal was to at some point remove all the standard Linux system calls.
I had no interest in co-existence.

> The Linux baggage is just the cost of having most hardware supported.
> Can most of the Linux kernel be look--don't touch?

Now that inferno has opened up why not just use inferno on linux?

One thing that would be a step forward would be to have a plan 9 distro
that included all the inferno stuff too. Mainly a packaging thing I guess.
But the plan 9/inferno split seems unnecessary (to me anyway).

The main reactions I see to Plan 9 are
- "I don't get the window manager"
- "Where's emacs"
- "Where's the browser"
- "How do I handle PCMCIA and USB"

I still think the last is the biggest deal. Hot-plug is really needed. It
would be nice to do it somehow better than the zillions of kernel modules
I see in linux:

Module                  Size  Used by    Tainted: PF
eepro100               19824   1
supermon_proc          12416   0
symdm                   1876   0  [supermon_proc]
vmnet                  24704   7
vmmon                  23636   4
prism2_pci             99656   1  (autoclean)
p80211                 25460   1  (autoclean) [prism2_pci]
radeon                 95736   1
agpgart                39168   3
binfmt_misc             6916   1
autofs                 10980   0  (autoclean) (unused)
ds                      8256   2
yenta_socket           11968   2
pcmcia_core            47008   0  [ds yenta_socket]
usb-uhci               24292   0  (unused)
usbcore                68576   1  [usb-uhci]

ron