Hi,
I was asking in a couple Linux and BSD communities if there were any concepts from Plan 9 converging in their respective OS, such as:
Everything (devices, etc.) are a file
Everything can be exported for network use
Processes and users spawn their own namespace for unique view of OS
In what ways has Redox OS implemented any of these concepts (if any)?
Thanks!
In redox everything is a scheme ( or a URL if you will ).
There is a section in the book describing it.
Basically it’s similar to plan9 in that everything in the OS should have a common type of interface.
It doesn’t suffer from some of the logical problems of “everything is a file” like /dev/sda1 being an interface inside of “/” that typically IS “/”.
It also doesn’t have some of the baggage. Do unix style file attributes always make sense for the data they represent in plan9 or gnu hurd? For example, you can’t give read permission to specific data in this file AFAIK. You either have full permission to read it or none.
This is an interesting thing to ask, because Plan 9 represented a shot at making a better Unix, but whilst a technical triumph, it would prove commercially unsuccessful.
One reason often advanced for this outcome is that Plan 9 was not so significantly better than Unix to take the wind out of the latter’s sails.
We are now in a position where more time has elapsed since the release Plan 9 in 1992 than the 20 years that separated the release of Unix and Plan 9. Hopefully the advances to computer science during the intervening time means that a state-of-the-art operating system is able to bring something new to the party.