Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[@CyberGizmo]

So I ran out of time to discuss 8 1/2 the replacement for X11, which was built-in to the Plan 9 kernel and ran in kernel space. But will try and do that one in the future.

[@unLinuxeroMas]

and the sucesor rio

[@CyberGizmo]

@@unLinuxeroMas yes will cover rio as well

[@EXTEZZEE]

Cool, looking forward to this.

[@tallioegian]

and inferno?

[@michaelp62]

Not much traffic here for the last year. I was a communications technician for AT&T and trained at Bell Labs in Basking Ridge, NJ as a UNIX system admin. I discovered Plan 9 at one of my classes in the 1980s. I bought the OS for $350 (4 hi density floppies, and a manual) and installed it on a PC. I never used it much. I was used to purchasing software and installing it on a Windows 3.1 PC. However I did enjoy the way it looked on the screen. I remember there was a browser called Mothra - another film reference. The inner workings of Plan 9 were beyond me, kind of like a joke that I didn't quite comprehend. I corresponded with a developer (at Alcatel, who bought part of the labs) and even contributed a bit to getting the mouse to work. FYI, a 3-button mouse is a requirement! I loved playing around with Plan 9 and was disappointed it wasn't adopted more widely within the AT&T company. I have the Raspberry Pi version and will start tinkering with it again. Thanks for the memories!

[@torsmork]

This storytelling format of telling your history and experiences alongside the history and workings of things is one of the things that makes your channel so excellent. Great job as always!

[@SpeedKreature]

My understanding is that Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and others worked on the product a bit fairly recently to create a derivative with the intent to use that product within Google as a replacement for Kubernetes (and its predecessor) b/c they are excessively complex--the administrative overhead was outside of Google's tolerance. The final release of Plan 9 from Bell Labs was in 2015 but it was re-licensed in 2021. A public derivative, Inferno, is very much alive and I worked on a globally distributed computing project which trialed Inferno. That trial ended in 2019 after realizing the benefits we gained came with significant drawbacks at scale--primarily kernel issues. We opted to fork seL4 and a partial rewrite to employ the namespace and service structure of Plan 9. That collapsed in mid-2020 about the same time the globe's tolerance for being full-time hermits was getting thin.

[@smorrow]

> A public derivative, Inferno, is very much alive and I worked on a globally distributed computing project which trialed Inferno u wot

[@smorrow]

Really though, I'd be interested in knowing.

[@david300m]

A nice walk down memory lane. Thanks for sharing. I used Plan 9 back in the day as a research project for distributed computing. I built several computers as separate services, CPU server, file server, etc. At that time, black computer cases were not common so I bought some to build the PC's. The funny thing is that the managers were more interested in the black cases more than the concept itself. 😁

[@RonJohn63]

"the managers were more interested in the black cases more than the concept itself." Doesn't surprise me at all. Humans "bike shed" all the time.

[@davidjohnston4240]

I had a lot of fun with plan9 when it was released. My tiny contribution was to fix some mouse code so it would work with my 3 button mouse. It was the only context in which I got to have an email exchange with DMR. Being able to set up the namespace for a program made it really easy to program on.

[@klokibril]

Nice of you to do a video on Plan 9! I have read a few things about Plan 9 in the past and it has always intrigued me.

[@kayakMike1000]

I ran a small cluster on some old raspberry pi systems. It's a remarkable system, but quite alien. You log into one of your nodes and the namespace pulls in all your file resources from all systems

[@capability-snob]

Solid dive into the architecture! One of my favourite little details of 9p is that it's request/reply with connection-local client selected identifiers. This is great for security but also for performance, making it arguably the most well thought out async api until CapTP came along at the end of the century.

[@ettoreatalan8303]

The operating system development at Bell Labs did not end with Plan 9. A successor to Plan 9 was developed with Inferno. However, Inferno seems to be even less known than Plan 9.

[@LappDog]

"Plan 9? Ah, yes. Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary gland of the recently dead."

[@Lucas98M]

Hey DJ, thanks for sharing your time with us! Very entertaining & informative as is the rule on your channel.

[@eugrus]

Lately it feels like you are reading my mind and making exactly the videos I want to see! 👍

[@CyberGizmo]

awesome

[@adventuresin9]

9P isn't just a network protocol. It is used inside a system too. So everything is network transparent. A local hard drive and network storage all looks the same to an application, as all are accessed by 9P. 9P is currently used some virtual machine software to access the host's resources, and even Microsoft has a 9P fork for Windows Subsystem for Linux.

[@CyberGizmo]

9P IS a network protocol. First sentence in the 9P Wiki article, so dont take my word for it. So I also checked with some of the documents from the author, he calls it a file system protocol, i would say it is both from the writeup. So will leave it at that. Peace

[@smorrow]

@@CyberGizmo He's right. 9P is running over named pipes before you even get to the installer.

[@thefrontfelloff]

@@CyberGizmo Yes adventuresin9 is correct, instead of reading the wiki perhaps you should be reading the code as a source of authority

[@CyberGizmo]

@@thefrontfelloff I disagree with that comment completely, 1) reading the code takes a lot of time 2) Its not always easy to see the intent the programmer had from the code and 3) this is why we document, if the documentation is inaccurate the project is NOT done period

[@thefrontfelloff]

@@CyberGizmo 1) I view this as part of the requirements before you would like to speak authoritatively on a software subject. Yes it takes time. 2) The intent of the author has no bearing on your misunderstanding of 9p. What we are trying to help you with is understanding the technical properties, not intent. 3) I can't quite infer which documentation you were referencing, and I disagree with your authority on deciding when a project is done. Things get documented, sometimes the wording is technically incorrect or confusing. We find those and fix them. However being persistent that some documentation is more accurate then the code, or those who work with the code, seems rather misguided.

[@biehdc]

I would watch you show off Plan 9 for 6 hours, sounds entertaining.

[@augusto256]

After seeing this brilliant explanation (there is not much information on this subject), and taking into account that in this decade the development trend of computer systems is more and more oriented towards IoT, I think that the computer industry should take more seriously the development of a solution such as Plan 9 for distributed operating systems on ARM architecture.

[@davidlaraezm]

Absolutely, the creators were ahead of their time!

[@doodlebug1820]

And now Rust uses utf8 for strings. Utf8 is one of the most genius things ever. There were so many arguments about how to do unicode but this solved so many of the issues via backwards compatability with ascii. Petfect example of why research on OSes is very important to real world.

[@praxis22]

I experimented with it when I first got into UNIX, in my very first admin job, a trip down memory lane.

[@thewiirocks]

Gosh, I haven't even thought about Plan 9 OS in probably 20 years. Thanks for reminding everyone this exists! Would love to see someone do a tour through a running OS as I was never able to get it installed. If you're going to do esoteric Operating Systems that had an impact, do ErOS next. ;)

[@alfiegordon9013]

Theres the adventuresin9 channel here on KZbin that goes through lots of usage stuff for plan9

[@thewiirocks]

@@alfiegordon9013 Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out!

[@kamilziemian995]

Thank you for all the information that you give us in these videos.

[@HaydenLikeHey]

Wow, this is really interesting! I've been wondering about what a world run with Plan 9 might look like. It seems like the Bell Labs devs really had the shared network system in mind. Thanks for making this vid!

[@smorrow]

Laptops kind of broke the most attractive thing about Plan 9.

[@DougForce]

Very interesting! Even better that the campy classic movie served as naming inspiration!

[@davidhiggen3029]

Going back to Unix evolution, I think while the BSD variant greatly contributed to wide adoption by incorporating TCP/IP, they made two horrible mistakes. One, they introduced a completely different network interface (sockets) which was not properly integrated into the filesystem namespace. And second, they introduced 'daemons'... userspace processes handling work which should probably have been done by the kernel in most cases.

[@smorrow]

Ninth-edition Unix had TCP in the manner of early Plan 9

[@proxymoxylinks]

Your videos are awesome mate, keep em coming

[@scottspitlerII]

How do you feel about fuchsia then? It’s a micro kernel, all networking is done in user space; but the device drivers map physical access to the NIC with the MMU. What are your thoughts??

[@paulwratt]

I am pretty sure there was and "semi-official" build of Plan9 for RPi2B+ (the older version, not the newer one that has the same CPU as RPi3's). By "semi-official" I mean it was compiled by one of the (ex-)team members and was made available on the "official Plan9" site. It can also run on RPi3. When I say "official Plan9" site, I mean I had to edit _/etc/hosts_ and add an IPv4 map to plan9 url's on the then (now?) historically maintained "official" site. I dont know if this has been resolved since 2018/19 when I collected the binaries and the sd-card images, but previous to that the Plan9 url did work normally (and may again one day).

[@rouchar]

Love your videos, as always. Make one about Openstack 😁

[@w4gap]

Excellent video, thanks for taking the time to make and share. For an excellent overview of the development of tcp/ip and alternative solutions (observations in hindsight obviously ;-) from John Day you should check out his book "Patterns in Network Architecture: A return to fundamentals". Please keep up the excellent work.

[@smorrow]

0:23 IIRC, Presotto is the inventor the firewall. 5:21 And today it is basically a whole new second kernel in userspace 13:40 was true for the first maybe-two editions (no-one used these; it wasn't open-source). Today you can log into the file server with permission. Back then it was something like a unikernel before unikernels. The code's still there, but hasn't been brought along to dip9k security.

[@justgivemethetruth]

Very interesting talk. I'd love to know more about Plan9, but I don't think it would be very useful except in the abstract for historical purposes. The guys that made it up where the wonder geniuses of Bell Labs. I wonder what became of them and their work after Plan9? The 8 1/2 sounds very interesting too. I hope I can catch that one.

[@theBENDS135]

This was great. I’ve seen a significant number of software projects refer to Plan 9 in their design philosophies. I never took the time to research it so, up until this point, Plan 9 remained sort of like a myth to me. I really liked this video.

[@smorrow]

The Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate was like that for me. It's online, you can read it, it's not that epic (in any sense).

[@marinoceccotti9155]

I remember having had a try at it in the early 2000.

[@MrDaskon]

Thanks man! It was very informative and entertaining

[@miguelangelooliveira184]

Hi DJ, I really like your videos! Why don't you make a video about Solaris 11? At least I can't find one... Thanks!

[@michaelwright2986]

I have a friend who does his home computing on Plan 9 running on old Thinkpads. I know him through a Latin reading group. Is there a common theme, or is Plan 9 still the future?

[@keyboard_g]

Plan9 means we need to see some of the Acme editor.

[@sonicsaviouryouwillnotgetm6678]

Interesting. How fast were network speeds back then? Seem like a pretty futuristic idea for the time, no?

[@davidweeks1997]

Nice to know. What can you tell us about hurd?

[@CyberGizmo]

Last update was in 2016, 4 out of the 6 linux distro's based on it are discontinued, I would say that puts it in the inactive project column. Debian and Arch have Hurd editions, I don't know much about the Arch version, but Debian GNU Hurd is a development release that offers 32-bit mode only and was updated in 2021.

[@guilherme5094]

👍Thanks DJ.

[@esra_erimez]

Would you please do a video about Minix 3? (and, maybe even Xinu)

[@CyberGizmo]

I have it on my list of to-do's.

[@muha0644]

10:24 Cirno my beloved!

[@256k_]

please more videos on plan9

[@scottspitlerII]

We need more stories!

[@armynyus9123]

After 2min: So k8s IS the plan9 idea materialized today, rite?

[@djwisd0m]

Thanks for this. :^)

[@kayakMike1000]

Plan 9 was the way the future could have been. This operating system was 20 years ahead of its time. All the ideas to distribute applications across many nodes was implemented in stuff "application servers" like weblogic and later websphere, later tomcat, jboss, and wildfly.

[@scottspitlerII]

12:51 don’t threaten me with a good time 😮🥳

[@justgivemethetruth]

This seems like it would be a great hardware base to implement some kind of arbitrary AI

[@papamoneyph]

vitanuova inferno too please

[@CyberGizmo]

yes had planned to cover it, so next time for sure

[@CRYPTiCEXiLE]

i have tried it on rasp-pi back in the day but i was like meh not for me....

[@CyberGizmo]

would imaging it would be a little slow on a 3B version

[@CRYPTiCEXiLE]

@@CyberGizmo it was more of not a Unix like style to take interest. It is a neat little OS.

[@MatthewHarrold]

I just discovered that WordNet (Princeton University) died in 2006, and it is my failure to realize this. I have been active in this industry in spurts and blurts from the mid-80's ... and honestly thought some of these projects were sure bets. I'm hopeful that Plan9 won't only be from outer space. Apparently linguistics is now an AI only world. I'm only commenting on this because I've found a like-minded bunch of humans who could possibly give DJ Ware a new topic to explore. $0.02

[@zetaconvex1987]

Would you say that the Bell Labs team was the best team of computer scientists ever assembled (no pun intended)?

[@UmbertoAmante]

Why is FTX popping up on the screen in the background!?!?!?

[@weird_oscillator]

It's from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[@keyboard_g]

10:27 Baby Wogue sighting.

[@andrewpalm2103]

Plan 9 From Outer Space is considered by many to be the worst movie ever made in Hollywood which puts it well below the "B movie" category. It's hard to find a worse film.

[@CyberGizmo]

It sure was, I couldnt even watch it to the end.

[@rockets4kids]

@@CyberGizmo "Ed Wood" is worth a watch.

[@adjusted-bunny]

DJWare we could hear you eating.

[@CyberGizmo]

have a cough so had a candy to keep from coughing during the video

[@skipinkoreaable]

@@CyberGizmo Thank you for sparing us the cough and giving us your real voice. I hope you get well soon. I'm just getting into the start of the video. I know this will be another very insightful video.

[@klaus13337]

I love everything, but how he plays with his fingers completely distracts me. Damn ADHD^^.

[@superangrybrit]

Very good video!

[@enriquewalton2777]

☺️ p͎r͎o͎m͎o͎s͎m͎