Plan 9


Plan 9

(operating system)(Named after the classically bad,exceptionally low-budget SF film "Plan 9 from Outer Space") Anoperating system developed at Bell Labs by manyresearchers previously intimately involved with Unix.

Plan 9 is superficially Unix-like but features far finercontrol over the name-space (on a per-process basis) and isinherently distributed and scalable.

Plan 9 is divided according to service functions. CPUservers concentrate computing power into largemultiprocessors; file servers provide repositories forstorage and terminals give each user of the system a dedicatedcomputer with bitmap screen and mouse on which to run awindow system. The sharing of computing and file storageservices provides a sense of community for a group ofprogrammers, amortises costs and centralises and hencesimplifies management and administration.

The pieces communicate by a single protocol, built above areliable data transport layer offered by an appropriatenetwork, that defines each service as a rooted tree of files.Even for services not usually considered as files, the unifieddesign permits some simplification. Each process has a localfile name space that contains attachments to all services theprocess is using and thereby to the files in those services.One of the most important jobs of a terminal is to support itsuser's customised view of the entire system as represented bythe services visible in the name space.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/.

Plan 9

A distributed operating system developed at Bell Labs that is known for its simplicity and low overhead. Although Plan 9 came from the same organization that created Unix, and it uses similar commands, Plan 9 is not Unix. All resources in a Plan 9 system are structured as files and accessed via the 9P protocol. The last release of Plan 9 was the fourth edition in 2002, which upgraded 9P to 9P2000. See Inferno and distributed operating system.