18 Jan
2020
18 Jan
'20
5:11 a.m.
On 1/17/20, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo(a)alchemistowl.org> wrote:
The answers I got varied from “the world needed a free Unix and BSD was
embroiled in the AT&T lawsuit at the time” to “Plan 9 also had a restrictive
license” (to the latter my response was that “so did Unix and that’s why
Linus built Linux!”) but I don’t feel any of the answers addressed my
underlying question as to what was wrong in the exposure to other operating
systems which made Unix the choice?
Linus has always struck me as purely a pragmatist and not idealistic
at all, so I'm not surprised that he wrote a conventional Unix rather
than something more architecturally progressive.
On 1/17/20, Brantley Coile <brantley(a)coraid.com> wrote:
Plan 9 solves the problem of "How do I make a bunch of machines look like a
single system?" If you wanted to mess around with a system in the early
1990's you didn't have a bunch of people and a bunch of systems you needed
to make appear as one. You just had a single box.
So, my Plan 9 remains small. In fact, I've been removing things from it,
like local disks, that is contrary to the original vision. (Or set of
visions. I remember getting a lot of different answers form everyone
involved in 1127 about what it was that they were doing.)
Wasn't the point of single-system-image clustering originally to allow
building relatively inexpensive systems with more CPUs than could
reasonably be fit into a single machine? Now that all current CPUs
except for some low-end embedded ones are multi-core and fully
programmable GPUs are ubiquitous, I don't think Plan 9/Amoeba-style
SSI is really all that relevant for anything other than HPC. However,
I do think distributed network-transparent sharing of devices and
services along the lines of QNX or Domain/OS is more relevant than
ever.