[9fans] FOSDEM 2026 Plan 9 Devroom - Call for Participation

[<red@redfrey.com>]

Hello,

I'm Revan Edfrey. I've been working with Plan 9 concepts for several
years now, building various projects that explore the boundaries of
what's possible with 9p and the Plan 9 philosophy.

I'd like to organize a Plan 9 devroom for FOSDEM 2026. The deadline
for proposals is October 12, and I haven't seen any discussion here
about it yet. Is anyone already working on a proposal? If not, I'm
happy to take the lead and would appreciate help from anyone interested
in making this happen.

FOSDEM 2026 specifically mentioned wanting "some more weird and
wonderful Plan9 ecosystem devrooms" this year. Read that again: FOSDEM
wants Plan 9. Are we going to let that go unanswered?

From what I can find, Plan 9 content at FOSDEM has been limited to
individual talks rather than a dedicated devroom. This is our chance to
change that and give our community proper space to showcase what we've
been building.

I envision a devroom that covers the full spectrum of Plan 9 work
happening today:

- Plan 9 distributions and forks (9front, 9legacy, Inferno)
- plan9port projects and extensions
- Distributed systems built on Plan 9 concepts
- File servers, auth systems, and namespace manipulation
- GPU support and hardware acceleration
- Novel approaches to Plan 9 package management
- Cross-pollination with other systems (Linux, BSDs)
- Hardware projects running Plan 9
- 9p protocol implementations and novel applications

The goal would be to bring together both core Plan 9 developers and
those applying Plan 9 ideas in new contexts, fostering collaboration
across the ecosystem.

If there's interest, I could present on several projects I've been
working on:

- A distributed self-healing cluster architecture that uses 9p as its
  communication protocol
- A general-purpose database library and userspace tools using Plan 9's
  ndb format with arbitrary-length strings
- A extension to mk for native subdirectory support with parallel
  execution
- A namespace-based package management system for Plan 9 that leverages
  bind and union directories
- Additional plan9port libraries (libvec for dynamic arrays, libstr for
  string manipulation... again!)
- A C VM. It's not as stupid as it sounds, I swear!
- Exportfs between Unix systems (Linux and OpenBSD for now) with unix
  domain sockets support. Aiming for X11 over 9p, for whatever reason

I'm sure many of you have equally interesting projects that deserve a
wider audience. A dedicated devroom would give us all a platform to
share this work.

To make this happen, I need to know:

- Who would be interested in attending or presenting?
- What specific topics would you like to see covered?
- Who can help with organizing (reviewing proposals, scheduling, etc.)?

If you have a project you'd like to present, please share a brief
description. Even if you're just interested in attending, let me know,
as demonstrating community interest will strengthen our proposal.

The deadline for devroom proposals is October 12, so we need to move
quickly. If we get enough interest, I'll draft and submit the proposal
this week.

Looking forward to hearing from you all. Let's show FOSDEM what the
Plan 9 community has been building!

Best,
Revan