Plan 9 from Bell Labs

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Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Installation of Plan 9
Company / developer Bell Labs
Programmed in Dialect of ANSI C
Working state Current
Source model Free and open source software
Initial release 1992 (universities) / 1995 (general public)
Latest stable release Fourth Edition / April 28, 2002; 10 years ago
Latest unstable release Snapshots / daily
Available language(s) English
Update method replica
Supported platforms x86 / Vx32, x86-64, MIPS, DEC Alpha, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM
Kernel type Monolithic
Default user interface rio / rc
License Lucent Public License
Official website plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a free software distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002. Plan 9 continues to be used and developed by operating system researchers and hobbyists.[1][2]
Plan 9 has novel features such as the 9P protocol for accessing local and remote resources as files, union mounts, an improved proc file system, and native unicode support throughout the system. In Plan 9, all system interfaces, including those required for networking and the user interface, are represented through the file system rather than specialized interfaces.
The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a reference to the Ed Wood 1959 cult science fiction Z-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.[3] Also, Glenda, the Plan 9 Bunny, is presumably a reference to Wood's film Glen or Glenda.

Contents

History

Date Release Comment
1992 Plan 9 1st Edition Released by Bell Labs to universities
1995 Plan 9 2nd Edition Released by Bell Labs for non-commercial purposes[4]
2000 Plan 9 3rd Edition (Brazil) Released by Lucent Technologies under an open source license for non-commercial use
2002 Plan 9 4th Edition Released by Lucent Technologies under a new free software license
Plan 9 was a Bell Labs internal project from its start during the mid 1980s. It replaced Unix as Bell Labs's primary platform for operating systems research. It explored several changes to the original Unix model that facilitate the use and programming of the system, notably in distributed multi-user environments. In 1992, Bell Labs provided the first public release to universities, and three years later a commercial second release version became available to the general public. In the late 1990s, Lucent Technologies, having inherited Bell Labs, dropped commercial support for the project. In 2000, a non-commercial third release was distributed under an open source license. A fourth release under a new free software license occurred in 2002.[5]
A user and development community, including current and former Bell Labs members and Massachusetts Institute of Technology personnel, continues to produce minor daily releases in form of ISO images. Bell Labs still hosts the development.[6] The development source tree is accessible over the 9P and HTTP protocols and is used to update existing installations.[7] In addition to the official components of the OS included in the ISOs, Bell Labs also hosts a repository of externally developed applications and tools.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs was originally developed by members of the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs, the same group that originally developed UNIX and C.[8] The Plan 9 team was initially led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie as head of the Computing Techniques Research Department. Over the years, many notable developers have contributed to the project including Brian Kernighan, Tom Duff, Doug McIlroy, Bjarne Stroustrup and Bruce Ellis.[9]

Design concepts

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is like the Quakers: distinguished by its stress on the 'Inner Light,' noted for simplicity of life, in particular for plainness of speech. Like the Quakers, Plan 9 does not proselytize.
—Sape J. Mullender, Pierre G. Janson.
Real Time in Real Operating System[10]
Plan 9 is an evolution of UNIX design concepts:[11]
  1. all objects are either files or file systems
  2. communication is over a network
  3. private namespaces allow their owners to access local and remote processes transparently
Plan 9 is a grid computing platform. It is an effort to provide a computing environment for geographically distributed clusters running on heterogeneous hardware, engineered for modern distributed environments and designed from the start to be a networked operating system.[12] It can be installed as a self-contained system and used on a single computer, but also has the capability to separate its components between separate computers. In a typical Plan 9 installation, users work at terminals running rio, and they access CPU servers which handle computation-intensive processes. Permanent data storage is provided by additional network hosts acting as file servers and archival storage.[13] Currently available desktop computers can emulate this architecture internally using multiple virtual machines.

9P protocol

To reduce the number of custom APIs and system calls, Plan 9 makes heavy use of the 9P protocol. 9P is a generic medium-agnostic byte-oriented protocol that provides for messages delivered between a server and a client.[14] The protocol is used to refer to and communicate with processes, programs, and data, including both the user interface and the network.[15] With the release of the 4th edition, it was modified and renamed 9P2000.[5]
Unlike most other operating systems, Plan 9 does not provide special application programming interfaces (such as Berkeley sockets, X resources or ioctl system calls) to access devices.[14] Instead, Plan 9 device drivers implement their control interface as a file system, so that the hardware can be accessed by the ordinary file input/output operations read and write. Consequently, sharing the device across the network can be accomplished by mounting the corresponding directory tree to the target machine.[3]

Union directories and namespaces

Plan 9 allows the user to collect the files (called names) from different directory trees in a single location. The name resolution is then performed from top to bottom: If the name doesn't exist in the top directory, it is looked up in lower ones until found. The same name in lower directories will be shown in the directory listing, but will not be accessible; thus, the merging of subdirectories is not handled.[16]
A union directory can be created by using the bind command:
; bind /arm/bin /bin  ; bind -a /usr/inferno/Plan9/arm/bin /bin  ; bind -b /usr/alice/bin /bin  
In the example above, /arm/bin is mounted at /bin, the contents of /arm/bin replacing the previous contents of /bin. Inferno's bin directory is then union mounted after /bin, and Alice's personal bin directory is union mounted before. When a file is requested from /bin, it is first looked for in /usr/alice/bin, then in /arm/bin, and then finally in /usr/inferno/Plan9/arm/bin.
This mechanism of union directories replaces the search path of conventional UNIX shells. As far as you are concerned, all executable programs are in /bin.
Furthermore, the kernel can keep separate mount tables for each process,[10] and can thus provide process with its own file system namespace. Processes' namespaces can be constructed independently, and the user may work simultaneously with programs that have heterogeneous namespaces.[18] Namespaces may be used to create an isolated environment similar to chroot, but in a more secure way.[14]
Plan 9's union directory architecture inspired BSD and Linux union file system implementations.[19]

Special virtual filesystems

/proc


Listing processes with list contents of directory (ls, lc) command[20] in /proc
Instead of having system calls specifically for process management, Plan 9 provides the /proc file system. Each process appears as a directory containing information and control files which can be manipulated by the ordinary file IO system calls.[16]
The file system approach allows Plan 9 processes to be managed with simple file management tools such as ls and cat; however, the processes cannot be copied and moved as files.[21]

/net

Plan 9 does not have specialised system calls or ioctls for accessing the networking stack or networking hardware. Instead, the /net file system is used. Network connections are controlled by reading and writing control messages to control files. Sub-directories such as /net/tcp and /net/udp are used as an interface to their respective protocols.[21]

Unicode

To reduce the complexity of managing character encodings, Plan 9 uses Unicode throughout the system. The initial Unicode implementation was ISO 10646. Ken Thompson invented UTF-8, which became the native encoding in Plan 9. The entire system was converted to general use in 1992.[22] UTF-8 preserves backwards compatibility with traditional null terminated strings, enabling more reliable information processing and the chaining of multilingual string data with Unix pipes between multiple processes. Using a single UTF-8 encoding with characters for all cultures and regions eliminates the need for switching between code sets.[23]

Combining the design concepts

Though interesting on their own, the design concepts of Plan 9 were supposed to be most useful when combined together. For example, to implement a network address translation (NAT) server, a union directory can be created, overlaying the router's /net directory tree with its own /net. Similarly, a virtual private network (VPN) can be implemented by overlaying in a union directory a /net hierarchy from a remote gateway, using secured 9P over the public Internet. A union directory with the /net hierarchy and filters can be used to sandbox an untrusted application or to implement a firewall.[14] In the same manner, a distributed computing network can be composed with a union directory of /proc hierarchies from remote hosts, which allows interacting with them as if they are local.
When used together, these features allow for assembling a complex distributed computing environment by reusing the existing hierarchical name system.[21]

Software for Plan 9

The distribution package for Plan 9 includes special compiler variants and programming languages, and provides a tailored set of libraries along with a windowing user interface system specific to Plan 9.[24] Its compiler is a dialect of C with some extensions and restrictions.[25]
As a benefit from the system's design, most tasks in Plan 9 can be accomplished by using ls, cat, grep, cp and rm utilities in combination with the rc shell (the default Plan 9 shell).
Factotum is an authentication and key management server for Plan 9. It handles authentication on behalf of other programs such that both secret keys and implementation details need only be known to Factotum.[26]

Graphical programs


Plan 9 running acme and rc
Unlike Unix, Plan 9 was designed with graphics in mind.[15] After booting, a Plan 9 terminal will run the rio windowing system, in which the user can create new windows displaying rc.[27] Graphical programs invoked from this shell replace it in its window.
The plumber provides an inter-process communication mechanism which allows system-wide hyperlinking.
Sam and acme are Plan 9's text editors.[28]

Storage system

Plan 9 supports the FAT and Fossil file systems. The latter was designed at Bell Labs specifically for Plan 9 and provides snapshot storage capability. It can be used directly with a hard drive or backed with Venti—an archival file system and permanent data storage system.

UNIX compatibility

Though Plan 9 was supposed to be a further development of UNIX concepts, compatibility with preexisting UNIX software was never the goal for the project. Still, many command line utilities of Plan 9 have aliases to the names of their UNIX counterparts.[20]
Plan 9 can support POSIX applications and can emulate the Berkeley socket interface through the ANSI/POSIX Environment (APE).[29] Some Linux binaries can be used with the help of a "linuxemu" (Linux emulator) application; however, it is still a work in progress.[30]

Impact


The wmii X window manager was inspired by acme, a text editor from the Plan 9 project.[31]
Plan 9 demonstrated that an integral concept of Unix—that every system interface could be represented as a set of files—could be successfully implemented in a modern distributed system.[27] Some features from Plan 9, like the UTF-8 character encoding of Unicode, have been implemented in other operating systems. Unix-like operating systems such as Linux have implemented 9P, Plan 9's file system, and limited forms of rfork-like system calls. Additionally, in Plan 9 from User Space, several of Plan 9's applications and tools, including the sam and acme editors, have been ported to Unix and Linux systems and have achieved some level of popularity. Several projects seek to replace the GNU operating system programs surrounding the Linux kernel with the Plan 9 operating system programs.[32][33] The 9wm window manager was inspired by , the older windowing system of Plan 9;[34] wmii is also heavily influenced by Plan 9.[31]
However, Plan 9 has never approached Unix in popularity, and has been primarily a research tool:
Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.
Other criticisms focused on the lack of commercial backup, the low number of end-user applications, and the lack of device drivers.[27][28]
Plan 9 proponents and developers claim that the problems hindering its adoption have been solved, that its original goals as a distributed system, development environment, and research platform have been met, and that it enjoys moderate but growing popularity.[10] Inferno, through its hosted capabilities, has been a vehicle for bringing Plan 9 technologies to other systems as a hosted part of heterogeneous computing grids.[35][36][37][38]
Several projects actively work to extend Plan 9, including 9atom and 9front. These forks augment Plan 9 with additional hardware drivers and software, including nupas (an improved version of the Upas e-mail system), the go compiler, Mercurial version control system support, and other programs.[2][39]

License

The full source code is freely available under Lucent Public License 1.02; it is considered to be open source by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), free software by the Free Software Foundation, and it passes the Debian Free Software Guidelines.[14] However, it is incompatible with the GNU General Public License.[40]

See also

References

  1. ^ Robertson, James (2011-07-16). "Plan 9 Forked, Continues as 9front". OSNews. Retrieved 2011-12-31.
  2. ^ a b "9atom". Retrieved 2011-11-11.
  3. ^ a b c Raymond, Eric S. (2003-09-17). "Plan 9: The Way the Future Was". The Art of UNIX Programming. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-13-142901-9. Retrieved 2007-05-07.
  4. ^ "Announcement of the first release to general public".
  5. ^ a b Loli-Queru, Eugenia (2002-04-29). "Bell Labs Releases New Version of Plan 9". OSNews. Retrieved 2011-12-31.
  6. ^ "How to contribute". Bell Labs. Lucent Technologies. Retrieved 2011-11-30.
  7. ^ "Staying up to date". Bell Labs. Lucent Technologies. Retrieved 2006-04-27.
  8. ^ "From the inventors of UNIX system comes Plan 9 from Bell Labs" (Press release). Lucent Technologies. 1995-07-18. Archived from the original on 2006-02-09.
  9. ^ McIlroy, Doug (1995-03). "Preface to the Second (1995) Edition". Bell Labs. Lucent Technologies. Retrieved 2006-04-02.
  10. ^ a b c Mullender, Sape J.; Janson, Pierre G. (2004-02-26). "Real Time in Real Operating System". In Herbert, Andrew J.; Jones, Karen Spärck. Computer systems: theory, technology, and applications : a tribute to Roger Needham. Springer Science+Business Media. p. 211. ISBN 978-0-387-20170-2. Retrieved 2011-12-24.
  11. ^ Bischof, Hans-Peter; Imeyer, Gunter; Wellhöfer, Bernhard & Schreiner, Axel-Tobias (1999). Das Netzbetriebssystem Plan 9. ISBN 3-446-18881-9.
  12. ^ Hancock, Brian (2003). "Reinventing Unix: an introduction to the Plan 9 operating system". Library Hi Tech (MCB UP) 21 (4): 471–476. doi:10.1108/07378830310509772.
  13. ^ Presotto, Dave; Pike, Rob; Thompson, Ken; Trickey, Howard. "Plan 9, A Distributed System". Bell Labs. Lucent Technologies. CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.41.9192.
  14. ^ a b c d e Pereira, Uriel M. (2006) (avi). The Unix Spirit set Free: Plan 9 from Bell Labs. FOSDEM. Retrieved 2011-12-02. Lay summary.
  15. ^ a b Minnich, Ron (2005). "Why Plan 9 is not dead yet And What we can learn from it" (pdf). Los Alamos National Laboratory. FAST-OS. Retrieved 2011-12-02.
  16. ^ a b Ballesteros, Francisco J. (2007-09-28). "Introduction to OS abstractions using Plan 9 from Bell Labs" (pdf). Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Archived from the original on 2010-09-21.
  17. ^ Kernighan, Brian (1995). "Readme". Lucent Technologies. Retrieved 2012-01-25. Hosted by mirtchovski.com.
  18. ^ Pike, R.; Presotto, D.; Thompson, K.; Trickey, H.; Winterbottom, P.. "The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9". Bell Labs. cat-v.org. Retrieved 2011-12-05.
  19. ^ Valerie, Aurora (2009-03-25). "Union file systems: Implementations, part I". LWN.net. Retrieved 2011-12-05.
  20. ^ a b "UNIX to Plan 9 command translation". Bell Labs. Lucent Technologies. Retrieved 2011-12-02.
  21. ^ a b c Pike, R.; Presotto, D.; Dorward, S.; Flandrena, B.; Thompson, K.; Trickey, H.; Winterbottom, P.. "Plan 9 from Bell Labs". Bell Labs. Lucent Technologies. Retrieved 2011-12-02.
  22. ^ Pike, Rob (2003-04-30). "UTF-8 History". Retrieved 2006-04-27.
  23. ^ Lunde, Ken (1999-01). CJKV information processing. O'Reilly Media. p. 466. ISBN 978-1-56592-224-2. Retrieved 2011-12-23.
  24. ^ Dixon, Rod (2004). Open source software law. Artech House. p. 213. ISBN 978-1-58053-719-3. Retrieved 2011-12-25.
  25. ^ Thompson, Ken (1992-02). "A new C Compiler". Australian UNIX systems User Group Newsletter (Kensington, Australia: AUUG, Inc.) 13 (1): 31–41. ISSN 1035-7521. Retrieved 2011-12-25.
  26. ^ Cox, R.; Grosse, E.; Pike, R.; Presotto, D.; Quinlan, S.. "Security in Plan 9". Bell Labs. Lucent Technologies. Retrieved 2011-12-02.
  27. ^ a b c Hudson, Andrew (2006-07-19). "Investigating the Plan 9 Operating System". OSNews. Retrieved 2011-12-31.
  28. ^ a b "An interview with Russ Cox". The Setup. 2011-04-09. Retrieved 2012-01-01.
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  31. ^ a b "window manager improved 2". suckless.org. Retrieved 2012-01-02. "[wmii] has a 9p filesystem interface and supports classic and tiling (acme-like) window management."
  32. ^ "Glendix: Bringing the beauty of Plan 9 to Linux". Retrieved 2011-12-01.
  33. ^ "Plan 9 From Gentoo: Plan 9 Meets Gentoo". Gentoo Linux. Retrieved 2011-12-01.
  34. ^ "The 9wm Window Manager". 9wm. Retrieved 2012-01-02. "9wm is an X window manager which attempts to emulate the Plan 9 window manager 8-1/2 as far as possible within the constraints imposed by X."
  35. ^ "9grid". Bell Labs. Lucent Technologies. Retrieved 2006-03-28.
  36. ^ "Press Release: Vita Nuova Supplies Inferno Grid to Evotec OAI" (pdf) (Press release). Vita Nuova. 2004-05-18. Retrieved 2006-03-28.
  37. ^ "Press Release: Rutgers University Libraries Install Inferno Data Grid" (pdf). Vita Nuova. 2004-05-12. Retrieved 2006-03-28.
  38. ^ "Press Release: The University of York Department of Biology install Vita Nuova's Inferno Data Grid" (pdf) (Press release). Vita Nuova. 2004-05-04. Retrieved 2006-03-28.
  39. ^ "plan9front - the front fell off". Retrieved 2011-12-01.
  40. ^ "Lucent Public License Version 1.02 (Plan 9 license)". Various Licenses and Comments about Them. Free Software Foundation. Retrieved 2011-12-02.

External links