[TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

[TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

[Douglas McIlroy]

> In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes

I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf

> This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish

So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
have met the same fate.

Doug

[TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

[A. P. Garcia]

> Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
have met the same fate.

Not at all. :-) Windows Subsystem for Linux uses 9P to share files
between the linux and windows environments on the same box:

$ ps -ef
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root         1     0  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:00 /init
root         4     1  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:02 plan9 --control-socket
5 --log-level 4 --server-fd 6 --pipe-fd 8 --log-truncate

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
> > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes
>
> I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
> System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
> story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
>
> > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>
> So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
> be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
> complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
> had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
> Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> have met the same fate.
>
> Doug

[TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

[ron minnich]

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The u-root cpu command uses 9p, and Eric Van Hensbergen recently submitted
changes to Linux kernel 9p that boost throughput 10x. We continue to look
at ways to make it faster.

9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 12:43 PM A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com>
wrote:

> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> have met the same fate.
>
> Not at all. :-) Windows Subsystem for Linux uses 9P to share files
> between the linux and windows environments on the same box:
>
> $ ps -ef
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
> root         1     0  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:00 /init
> root         4     1  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:02 plan9 --control-socket
> 5 --log-level 4 --server-fd 6 --pipe-fd 8 --log-truncate
>
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
> <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that
> have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just
> pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes
> >
> > I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
> > System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
> > story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
> >
> > > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
> >
> > So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
> > be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
> > complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
> > had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> > have met the same fate.
> >
> > Doug
>

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[TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

[Douglas McIlroy]

> 9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)

Thanks to all who set me straight. Sometimes being corrected is good news.

Doug

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:47 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The u-root cpu command uses 9p, and Eric Van Hensbergen recently submitted changes to Linux kernel 9p that boost throughput 10x. We continue to look at ways to make it faster.
>
> 9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)
>
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 12:43 PM A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
>> have met the same fate.
>>
>> Not at all. :-) Windows Subsystem for Linux uses 9P to share files
>> between the linux and windows environments on the same box:
>>
>> $ ps -ef
>> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
>> root         1     0  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:00 /init
>> root         4     1  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:02 plan9 --control-socket
>> 5 --log-level 4 --server-fd 6 --pipe-fd 8 --log-truncate
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
>> <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>> >
>> > > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes
>> >
>> > I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
>> > System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
>> > story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
>> >
>> > > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>> >
>> > So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
>> > be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
>> > complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
>> > had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
>> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
>> > have met the same fate.
>> >
>> > Doug

[TUHS] 9P Lives. (Was: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure)

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Doug,

> > 9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)
>
> Thanks to all who set me straight.  Sometimes being corrected is good
> news.

Another corner where I keep spotting 9P is on small embedded devices
which lack physical controls but want to give a rich interface to the
outside world without going the web-server route.

9P is also used inside QEMU, the machine emulator and ‘virtualiser’.
https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9p

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

[Dan Cross]

[TUHS to Bcc]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes
>
> I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
> System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
> story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf

Interesting. This is now being discussed on the Multicians list (which
had a DTSS emulator! Done for use by SIPB). Warren Montgomery
discussed communication files under DTSS for precisely this kind of
thing; apparently he had a chess program he may have run under them.
Barry Margolin responded that he wrote a multiuser chat program using
them on the DTSS system at Grumman.

Margolin suggests a modern Unix-ish analogue may be pseudo-ttys, which
came up here earlier (I responded pointing to your wonderful note
linked above).

> > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>
> So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
> be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
> complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
> had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
> Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> have met the same fate.

I wonder if there was an analogy to multiplexed files, which I admit
to knowing very little about. A cursory glance at mpx(2) on 7th
Edition at least suggests some surface similarities.

        - Dan C.