[9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Brantley Coile]

Given that Google has a critical mass of Plan 9 people working away, and doing great things in my humble opinion, one wonders, what kind of environment are you running?  What does the people who created Plan 9 use day to day?

Thanks
Brantley

Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Jacob Todd]

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I think mostly Macs with p9p.

-- 
I am a man who does not exist for others.

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Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE6BBM/VE7TFX)]

> I think mostly Macs with p9p.

The Go(ogle) announcement video combined with running platforms
indicate MacOS.

Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Russ Cox]

The standard set up for a Plan 9 aficionado here seems to
be a Mac or Linux machine running Plan 9 from User Space
to get at sam, acme, and the other tools.  Rob, Ken, Dave, and I
use Macs as our desktop machines, but we're a bit of an exception.
Most Google engineers use Linux machines, and I know of
quite a few ex-Bell Labs people who are happy to be using
sam or acme on those machines.  My own setup is two
screens.  The first is a standard Mac desktop with non-Plan 9
apps and a handful of 9terms, and the second is a full-screen
acme for getting work done.  On Linux I do the same but the
first screen is a Linux desktop running rio (formerly dhog's 8½).

More broadly, every few months I tend to get an email from
someone who is happy to have just discovered that sam is still
maintained and available for modern systems.  A lot of the time
these are people who only used sam on Unix, never on Plan 9.
The plan9port.tgz file was downloaded from 2,522 unique
IP addresses in 2009, which I suspect is many more than
Plan 9 itself.  In that sense, it's really nice to see the tools
getting a much wider exposure than they used to.

I haven't logged into a real Plan 9 system in many years,
but I use 9vx occasionally when I want to remind myself how
a real Plan 9 tool worked.  It's always nice to be back,
however briefly.

Russ

Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Philippe Anel]

Thanks for this info Russ.

Can you briefly tell us why you (Russ, Rob, Ken and Dave) no longer use
Plan9 ?
Because of missing apps or because of missing driver for your hardware ?
And do you still use venti ?

Phil;

----- Original Message -----
From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@9fans.net>
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 2:15 AM
Subject: Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?


The standard set up for a Plan 9 aficionado here seems to
be a Mac or Linux machine running Plan 9 from User Space
to get at sam, acme, and the other tools.  Rob, Ken, Dave, and I
use Macs as our desktop machines, but we're a bit of an exception.
Most Google engineers use Linux machines, and I know of
quite a few ex-Bell Labs people who are happy to be using
sam or acme on those machines.  My own setup is two
screens.  The first is a standard Mac desktop with non-Plan 9
apps and a handful of 9terms, and the second is a full-screen
acme for getting work done.  On Linux I do the same but the
first screen is a Linux desktop running rio (formerly dhog's 8½).

More broadly, every few months I tend to get an email from
someone who is happy to have just discovered that sam is still
maintained and available for modern systems.  A lot of the time
these are people who only used sam on Unix, never on Plan 9.
The plan9port.tgz file was downloaded from 2,522 unique
IP addresses in 2009, which I suspect is many more than
Plan 9 itself.  In that sense, it's really nice to see the tools
getting a much wider exposure than they used to.

I haven't logged into a real Plan 9 system in many years,
but I use 9vx occasionally when I want to remind myself how
a real Plan 9 tool worked.  It's always nice to be back,
however briefly.

Russ

Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Russ Cox]

> Can you briefly tell us why you (Russ, Rob, Ken and Dave)
> no longer use Plan9 ?
> Because of missing apps or because of missing driver for your hardware ?
> And do you still use venti ?

Operating systems and programming languages have
strong network effects: it helps to use the same system
that everyone around you is using.  In my group at MIT,
that meant FreeBSD and C++.  I ran Plan 9 for the first
few years I was at MIT but gave up, because the lack of
a shared system made it too hard to collaborate.
When I switched to FreeBSD, I ported all the Plan 9 libraries
and tools so I could keep the rest of the user experience.

I still use venti, in that I still maintain the venti server that
takes care of backups for my old group at MIT.  It uses
the plan9port venti, vbackup, and vnfs, all running on FreeBSD.
The venti server itself was my last real Plan 9 installation.
It's Coraid hardware, but I stripped the software and had installed
my own Plan 9 kernel to run venti on it directly.  But before
I left MIT, the last thing I did was reinstall the machine using
FreeBSD so that others could help keep it up to date.

If I wasn't interacting with anyone else it'd be nice to keep
using Plan 9.  But it's also nice to be able to use off the shelf
software instead of reinventing wheels (9fans runs on Linux)
and to have good hardware support done by other people
(I can shut my laptop and it goes to sleep, and even better,
when I open it again, it wakes up!).  Being able to get those
things and still keep most of the Plan 9 user experience by
running Plan 9 from User Space is a compromise, but one
that works well for me.

Russ

Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[David Leimbach]

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On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 12:35 AM, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:

> > Can you briefly tell us why you (Russ, Rob, Ken and Dave)
> > no longer use Plan9 ?
> > Because of missing apps or because of missing driver for your hardware ?
> > And do you still use venti ?
>
> Operating systems and programming languages have
> strong network effects: it helps to use the same system
> that everyone around you is using.  In my group at MIT,
> that meant FreeBSD and C++.  I ran Plan 9 for the first
> few years I was at MIT but gave up, because the lack of
> a shared system made it too hard to collaborate.
> When I switched to FreeBSD, I ported all the Plan 9 libraries
> and tools so I could keep the rest of the user experience.
>
> I still use venti, in that I still maintain the venti server that
> takes care of backups for my old group at MIT.  It uses
> the plan9port venti, vbackup, and vnfs, all running on FreeBSD.
> The venti server itself was my last real Plan 9 installation.
> It's Coraid hardware, but I stripped the software and had installed
> my own Plan 9 kernel to run venti on it directly.  But before
> I left MIT, the last thing I did was reinstall the machine using
> FreeBSD so that others could help keep it up to date.
>
> If I wasn't interacting with anyone else it'd be nice to keep
> using Plan 9.  But it's also nice to be able to use off the shelf
> software instead of reinventing wheels (9fans runs on Linux)
> and to have good hardware support done by other people
> (I can shut my laptop and it goes to sleep, and even better,
> when I open it again, it wakes up!).  Being able to get those
> things and still keep most of the Plan 9 user experience by
> running Plan 9 from User Space is a compromise, but one
> that works well for me.
>
> Russ
>
>
And as you said before, there's always the vx32 port :-).  I find it's often
a lot more practical for me to run stuff in that or Inferno hosted on Mac OS
X as well.  I used to keep a Plan 9 box at home, but it released the magic
smoke the other day, and I'm afraid that means it's dead.

I've been kicking a few ideas around about replacing it, and maybe trying to
make it more useful to the community somehow that I run one, but I've got to
get buy in from the wife to invest.  (Isn't there some tax write-off for
hobbies or something in the US?)

Dave

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Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Rob Pike]

What Russ says is true but for me it was simpler. I used Plan 9 as my
local operating system for a year or so after joining Google, but it
was just too inconvenient to live on a machine without a C++ compiler,
without good NFS and SSH support, and especially without a web
browser.  I switched to Linux but found it very buggy (the main
problem was most likely a bad graphics board and/or driver, but still)
and my main collaborator (Robert Griesemer) had done the ground work
to get a Mac working as a primary machine inside Google, and Russ had
plan9port up, so I pushed plan9port onto the Mac and have been there
ever since, quite happily.  Nowadays Apples are officially supported
so it's become easy, workwise.

I miss a lot of what Plan 9 did for me, but the concerns at work override that.

-rob

Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Brantley Coile]

Thanks for all the responses.  We us a lot of Macs as well.  Everyone has a Mac and use plan9ports, drawterm, 9vx, terminals running in Parallels or Fusion, and hosted Inferno.  We also, of course, have a real Plan 9 network with a Ken file server using EtherDrive as both the local cache and the worm drives, and a collection of cpu servers for doing development driver work.  We get the best of both worlds.

Thanks again.
Brantley

Re: [9fans] What operating systems are the google guys using?

[Peter A. Cejchan]

> I haven't logged into a real Plan 9 system in many years,

Oooooh, noooo!!! WHY?!?

As a plain user, a non-techie, I use Plan 9 native as my firs OS on
everyday basis... I log onto linux only for testing things that may be
worth porting, and for compiling the c++ stuff...

Please, do not let the native Plan 9 die...

++pac