From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:31:32 -0700 From: Lyndon Nerenberg To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <20110916010220.5e3adb54@kolari.ethans.dre.am> User-Agent: Alpine 1.10 (OSX 962 2008-03-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Subject: [9fans] my kingdom for a web browser :-P Topicbox-Message-UUID: 227e7122-ead7-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Thu, 15 Sep 2011, ron minnich wrote: > wrote: >> A virtualizer running on Plan 9 would waste far less time than implementing enough Linux syscalls to run a Linux distro new enough to run any browser newer than Opera 9. > That's a very interesting point. Implementing lguest on Plan 9 would > require something like 13 "system calls". Far easier than doing the > near-400 system calls of linux correctly. But all of these 'solutions' mean running a foreign binary under some sort of emulation. None of these integrate with the native environment. I.e. I can't plumb a URL to Firefox running under the linuxulator. (Can I? If there's a way I can't find it.) And that being the case, how are these emulated browsers any different from cranking up vncv to an external host and running the browser there? (I fully expect Eric to leap in here and point out he has nothing other than Plan9 running :-) Anyone else?) While it's mildly annoying, I still manage quite well with vncv and Firefox running on a UNIX host. Said host has u9fs and mounts under /n on the Plan9 hosts, so it's not that difficult to save things and copy them into a permanent home on the file server. And it's trivial to code up an rc script that uses ssh to pass URLs to a remote browser instance. Wouldn't we be better off rewriting the Plan 9 kernel in Javascript? --lyndon