Re: [9fans] 9vx as a perfect proto environment

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

> It's fast. But the big beauty of it for me is that in vx32/src/9vx/a
> is pretty much a plan 9 kernel in plan 9 C vernacular. I just spent an
> easy short time prototyping some new stuff that I can now drop into a
> real plan 9 kernel for Blue Gene, no changes needed. The
> edit/build/test boot cycle is measured in seconds. The fact that we
> have a friendly path via codereview(1) and bitbucket is the icing on
> the cake.

This is definitely one of my favorite things about 9vx.
It's a great environment for doing kernel hacking.

> [comments about instability]

I don't think there's any inherent reason why 9vx must be unstable,
but it certainly has a couple bugs.  I haven't had the time to track
them down and fix them, but I'm always happy to point in the
right direction if you can reproduce one.  There have been a
few reports about it dying with cryptic errors from vx32.  I'd like
to track those down but a reproducible test case is an absolute
requirement for the gritty low-level code at the bottom.

The fact that 9vx works as well as it does has always made me
feel like I was cheating.  It feels like it should be impossible
or at least much harder, and yet there it is, and most things run.

Russ