http://www.sdtimes.com/link/35742 Plan 9 returns from space By Alex Handy Read more: http://sdt.bz/35742#ixzz2ChuRBvKD Follow us: @sdtimes on Twitter | sdtimes on Facebook July 18, 2011 — (Page 1 of 3) Unix is not the only operating system to come out of Bell Labs. Since the mid-1990s, Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system has been something of a niche distributed operating system. Despite two prior open-source releases, Plan 9 has remained niche and is today maintained by only one employee at Bell Labs. As such, the Plan 9 community decided to take matters into its own hands. Julius Schmidt is a high school student and a developer who uses Plan 9 for some hobby and experimentation work. He joined forces with a group of developers that congregated around a website called Cat-V.org. There the Plan 9 fork, 9front, was created and released under the MIT license. Schmidt said that the previous open-source releases of Plan 9 were controlled by Geoff Collyer at Bell Labs, and with a single gatekeeper to the project, many felt that things had grown stagnant. Schmidt also said that there was a perception within the community that Collyer was rejecting most of the patches submitted by the community. Efforts to reach Geoff Collyer, maintainer of Plan 9 at Bell Labs, for this story were unsuccessful. Schmidt said that work on the fork has been proceeding since March of this year. Since then, the 9front community has replaced the Plan 9 file system, rewritten the boot loader, and added a large number of new drivers. The details of Plan 9 At its core, Plan 9 is entirely filesystem-based. The operating system extends the principles seen in Unix when dealing with I/O: Directories in the filesystem correspond to devices connected to the machine and can be accessed through those directories. Plan 9 takes this model a step further and allows access to all system functions and capabilities through the file system, instead of through APIs. As such, Plan 9 used its own file system, known as Fossil. Thanks to years of slow development, Fossil had accrued some issues, and thus a full replacement was deemed necessary by the 9front community. According to Schmidt, the community created the cached WORM file system (CWFS), a file system that is essentially a reimplementation of Fossil. July 18, 2011 — (Page 2 of 3) “A major feature of CWFS (Fossil supports this in a different manner) is the daily backup system,” said Schmidt. “It uses a WORM device (or a hard disk nowadays) for keeping the old versions, and a hard disk cache for new versions and fast access to the old ones.” Plan 9 and 9front are both distributed, network-based operating systems. In 2002, Venti was added to Plan 9, giving the system a modern network storage system that permanently stores data with a SHA-1 hash of the data acting as its identifier. This means that no two files will ever share the same identifier, and that the data's integrity can quickly be verified by comparing the stored data's hash with its identifier. A similar storage system was later adopted by Git. Stanley Lieber is another developer who uses Plan 9. He became interested in the project when he stumbled upon Cat-v.org, and was intrigued to learn more about the operating system he said he failed to use properly in 1999/2000. Lieber said that Plan 9 and 9front are perfectly suited for the cloud, and that 9front is currently under heavy development. He added that most of 9front's developers were originally developing for Plan 9, but got fed up with the way that project was run. “So far, 9front is a group of existing Plan 9 users who started changing the system on their own," he said. "Plan 9 is the sequel to Unix, created by the same people who created Unix. The purpose of Plan 9 was to extend and improve upon those original Unix ideas in the network era." Aaron Lancaster, another Plan 9 user and 9front developer, also said that Plan 9 is the perfect operating system for the cloud. “Plan 9 virtualizes well, and its entire basis is 'The network is the computer.' You could say it was 'the cloud' before the idea of the cloud even existed,” he said. And while it would seem that 9front has brought Plan 9 back from the dead, much like the zombies in the Ed Wood movie, Lieber said it's not right to say Plan 9 ever died. July 18, 2011 — (Page 3 of 3) “When Plan 9 was being actively developed fulltime at Bell Labs, they were very strict about what changes could be made to the system, and for good reason," he said. "Rob Pike characterized the Plan 9 approach as being an argument for simplicity and restraint.” It would seem that the 9front community has upheld this ideal, as thus far 9front is mostly about fixing instability and bringing online compatibility with new hardware. And this is, at its heart, the purpose of 9front: to allow the Plan 9 community to contribute to the operating system without having to, as one contributor put it, “Wait for the elder druids to include your patch.” For the future of 9front, the community is planning to add even more drivers to the platform. One member of the community has already ported Google's Go language to the platform, but other languages might not be arriving anytime soon. Currently there is little to no C++, Java or .NET support on the platform. Related Search Term(s): Bell Labs, open source, Plan 9 Comments 07/18/2011 05:31:48 PM EST I'm not an active 9front developer but I know most of those involved and have watched it progressing. It's good to see it in the press! One small errata: cwfs was not developed by the community but rather derives from "kenfs" - the file server Plan 9 used before Fossil, which was so nicknamed because Ken Thompson wrote it. United KingdomEthan Grammatikidis 07/18/2011 05:35:04 PM EST To my friends on the Left: I can love 9front and hate all else. Not only can I, I must. Only the annihilation of a system of exploitation carries with it the core of the rebirth of our people. […] If we make clear to the man of the left that the affirmation of simplicity and the misuse of its resources have nothing to do with each other, indeed that they go together like fire and water, then even as a programmer he will come to affirm the nation, which he will want to conquer. […] 9front will become reality when software is free. Why Are We 9Front? We are 9front because we see in 9front, that is the union of all citizens, the only chance to maintain our software inheritance and to regain our political freedom and renew our operating state. 9front is the doctrine of liberation for the working class.[…] United StatesStanley Lieber 07/19/2011 07:46:24 PM EST I suppose that sdtimes is a magazine of some sort. Given that, you ought to adhere to minimal standards of journalism and check with multiple sources, especially people like Geoff who are working hard to keep Plan 9 going and contribute quite a lot of code on a regular basis. I also contribute to Plan 9, and have for 10 years, both code and project support -- I am PI of the project that ported Plan 9 to one of the world's largest supercomputers. I joined 9front briefly but left it for many reasons. I am worried about the misinformation they keep spreading about what's going on with Plan 9. 9front had promise but has been a disappointment. Ron Minnich United Statesron minnich