19 Jun
2022
19 Jun
'22
4:47 p.m.
Just chiming in a bit..
Rob, it might be interesting to old geezers like me as well as newbies
entering the field to get a perspective on Plan 9 and its evolution. The
motivations behind it. What your group was trying to accomplish, the
approach, pitfalls and the entire decision making process as things went
along. Even things that went horribly wrong and what happened etc.
Sorry for my potential ignorance here, but other than the documents that
come with the source code distribution, there does not seem to be any
official textbook style document available with that level of detail going
into the evolution and back story.
I am thinking more in terms of the multics book that came out after that
project failed.
Perhaps even some college level tutorial videos on YouTube that do a deep
dive. Leaving your group's collective wisdom and insight for prosperity.
Anatomy of a Research Operating System. Approaching the Design of a modern
day distributed Operating Systems, practices and pitfalls.
(You can stop laughing 😃 now....)
On Sun, Jun 19, 2022, 4:53 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Aha, yes, my mistake, sorry about that. I bet I
misread that mail because
of the mention of a Sun port, which put me in a nostalgic (read: resentful)
mood.
Anyway, knowing about the Plan 9 VAX kernel might be interesting, but the
kernel itself was not.
-rob
On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 6:17 PM Angelo Papenhoff <aap(a)papnet.eu> wrote:
I wasn't talking about Plan 9, but it's
interesting to know that there
was an attempt at a VAX kernel.
On 19/06/22, Rob Pike wrote:
The VAX Plan 9 kernel isn't worth anything.
It never worked, was never
used, and was abandoned completely when better SMP machines started
appearing. The VAX code wasn't even ported, as I remember it; Ken and I
started over from scratch with a pair of 4-core SGI machines with MIPS
CPUs
and wackadoo synchronization hardware.
-rob