From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 21:29:26 -0500 From: "Russ Cox" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: Again: (self)hosted Plan9? Was: [9fans] extending xen to allow In-Reply-To: <29101.1165882921@lunacy.ugrad.cs.cmu.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <29101.1165882921@lunacy.ugrad.cs.cmu.edu> Topicbox-Message-UUID: f0bdc548-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 We talked at length about this issue at IWP9 without a lot of consensus. However, I think that many of us agreed on these points: - writing drivers sucks. - copying Linux and Windows will accomplish very little. - one significant place where Plan 9 wins is using it as a versatile base for building pieces that people use without knowing it's Plan 9 (e.g., Sape's wireless base stations, Rangboom, xcpu, and many Inferno apps that Charles can't talk about). - there may be real value in finding a way to use Xen or other virtualization technologies to run Plan 9 on machines (for example, terminals) where you care more about the convenience of having Plan 9 than about the performance (or reliability!) of having it in control of the hardware. And perhaps most important of all: - remember to keep it fun! I can't deny the utility of having Firefox (I'm writing this in a Firefox window), but even if Plan 9 could run Firefox, the next thing would be oh but it needs to be able to run these ten plugins, and so on and so on. Personally, I think you are going to be much happier running Plan 9 in some VM environment on Linux or Windows than putting in the effort for the other way around. Russ