Re: [9front] Enabling a service

[Stuart Morrow <morrow.stuart@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 8 May 2024 at 21:17, hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
> i had hoped there would evolve something out of lapfs for a long time.
> i still think of it often, but now i stopped using laptops mostly,
> so...

But even within a single box, Something Like Orifs could replicate
across heterogeneous disks (as a side effect of being able to
replicate across different boxes).  It might be faster than devfs
because a write's correctness doesn't depend on every one of the disks
being touched straight away (disconnected operation is the premise of
Orifs).

Online resizing of a sort would fall out for free, too, not by
resizing the partition but by making a new partition and doing as
above (except with a partition instead of a disk). This would be good
to have on platforms installed by just writing 9front.*.img to the
disk.

The Orifs paper (old enough to be referenced by the newest Modern
Operating Systems by Tanenbaum) doesn't think of either of those.

With multiple machines:

Replication subsumes backups, at least the first level of them
(copies, but in the same building).  Plan 9 has a founding assumption
that computers are capital goods, and there's someone whose job it is
to make backups.  Today every 9front user has to do this themselves.
I understand the point of an operating system to be "to make computers
easier to use", not "& but only up to a certain point and then stop".

The Something Like Orifs <> Something Like Orifs protocol wouldn't be
9P.  So it's faster over the internet.

(Orifs itself is C++ abandonware.)