[9fans] Plan 9/Inferno Birds of a Feather at OSDI: Summary

[Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>]

Okay, I'm a really bad person and didn't take any sort of good notes
on things.  I apologize in advance for omissions and
misinterpretations.

There was maybe a dozen or so people that attended the BoF, but we
were fortunate to have lots of folks who have worked or are actively
working on Plan 9.

As far as new stuff, I think the most exciting piece was Ron's
discussion (and demonstration) of his Xen Plan 9 port.  Overall it
seems much snappier than vmware and Ron is actively working to get the
code released.  In addition to the discussion and demo, there was some
discussion on hypervisors, para-virtualization and why this is a good
thing for Plan 9.

I talked a bit about progress with v9fs (Linux support for 9P2000),
and it seemed like the general consensus that this combined with Russ'
plan9port applications are a really good thing.

I also talked a bit about the stuff that I'm doing as part of my
research - namely looking at using 9P to share resources between
para-virtualized partitions.

Ron Minnich talked a bit about 9grid along with talking about the
status of DOE funding for 64-bit compilers and a 64-bit Opteron port. 
The short summary is there has been a bureaucratic snag with the funds
- but hopefully it'll be straighted out real soon now and things can
really get going.

The general consensus on the 9grid stuff is it really needs someone to
step up and kinda take ownership of doing some of the logistical
overhead (setting up accounts, answering setup questions, etc.)

Geoff told us a bit about 9netics and what they are working on. 
Sounds like he, Brucee, and Skip have found a way to be paid for
working on Plan 9 stuff.

As far as core Plan 9 progress goes - there seems to be a steady
stream of patches and fixes going into the code.  There are mechanisms
to see what changes are going in on a day to day basis, but there is
not always a good description of why the changes went in.  I'm going
to work on trying to come up with some sort of automated digest of the
changes and post them to the plan9dev mailing list on a weekly basis.

One of the biggest problem with the code at this point is that it has
drifted out of sync with the documentation.  If people are looking to
help out, going over the documentation, man pages, and wiki and
aligning them with reality would be a great service to the community.

There was a little discussion on what happens when Lucent shuts off
the lights.  There seems to be a high level of confidence that all the
vital pieces have been replicated by enough folks that we could have
core community services (web, wiki, and more importantly sources) back
up within a few days.

We talked a bit about the FOAF/web-of-trust authentication model.  And
it seemed that folks thought that this was a bad idea.  We really need
to try using the existing centralized authentication facilities as a
community.  Let's not create problems that may or may not exist.

That's about it.  There was some other discussions, but memory is
fuzzy.  Other folks that were there please feel free to fill in any of
the details I might have missed or misinterpreted.

          -eric