From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 10:20:06 -0400 From: Russ Cox To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] alright, this should be interesting In-Reply-To: <320b123fe6c1eae9379c3a7091330272@quintile.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <320b123fe6c1eae9379c3a7091330272@quintile.net> Topicbox-Message-UUID: f1a433e2-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > As plan9 applications access all resources via files so, > if you emulate file access you emulate the whole enviroment. > This is similar to cygwin but the job is simpler as there is > a nice abstraction layer between the app and the suporvisor. > There could be a shortcut in the file emulation library for > direct access to physical files as a speedup but it wouldn't be > required in the first pass. > > Sorry if this is all obvious to everyone, and doubly sorry > if this is exactly how the plan9 ports works, I use the ports > occasionally but I have never looked "under the hood". Just FYI, it's not, for the most part. The 9pm stuff that seanq did was a bit closer to this, and an intermediate step between 9pm and the ports that I did a few years ago behaved almost exactly like this, with a separate "9kernel" process that all the ported apps talked with to execute "system calls". But I found the debugging tremendously frustrating (bugs in the kernel brought everything down) and the amount of integration didn't seem necessary. In the current ports, each process is on its own as far as the rest of the system is concerned, and code has been rewritten (mostly in libraries) to accomodate the base systems where needed. Russ