Plan 9 (operating system)

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Plan 9
Glenda bunny mascot of plan 9 from bell black.jpg
Plan 9 from Bell Labs (Installation) .png
Installation of the system
developer Bell Laboratories
License (s) GNU General Public License v2
First publ. 1992
Current  version Fourth Edition (April 2002 - since then continuous updates)
Kernel Hybrid kernel
ancestry Unix
↳ Plan 9
Architecture (s) x86 , AMD64 , MIPS , SPARC , PowerPC , ARM
Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is an operating system that was developed in the late 1980s by Bell Laboratories , which had previously developed Unix . It is considered an attempt to consistently implement the principle Everything is a file . It is named after the "worst US film of all time" Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) by Ed Wood , in which the aliens bring the dead back to life (Plan 9 contains further allusions to the work of Ed Wood, e.g. the mascot Glenda, which can be traced back to the film Glen or Glenda (1953)).

Plan 9 can be used as a platform for research projects in the areas of (Unix) operating systems and networks.

In 2011 a group of Plan 9 developers split off a fork of the system under the name Plan 9 Front due to dissatisfaction with the development under the motto “The Front fell off” .

Features and structure

Plan 9 with a terminal window and the text editor acme

A ready-to-install system currently only exists for the x86 processors and the Raspberry Pi , but overall the Intel , MIPS , DEC-Alpha , PowerPC , SPARC and ARM architectures are supported, i.e. H. Plan 9 also runs on the iPAQ Pocket PC ( called Bitsy here ). There is also porting to the Xen virtual machine . The system is written in a dialect of ISO-C and supports UTF-8 ( Unicode ). A three-button mouse is required for optimal operation . Plan 9 includes a. the window system rio , the editor sam , a kind of window / file manager called acme and the command line interpreter rc . A number of software packages such as Perl , Python and TeX have been ported and are available separately.

With Plan 9, the developers want an answer to the question “ What is Unix really trying to achieve? " give. In one sentence this answer is:

Represent all resources as files without distinguishing between local and non-local objects.

The concept of the file has been expanded so that all resources (files, screens, users, computers, etc.) have a name and how files are addressed. There is a standard protocol called 9P to address these resources. Furthermore, all file system hierarchies are summarized in a single large hierarchy. Concrete examples of the effects of these principles: reachable servers are part of the file system, running programs are part of the file system, etc.

This underlying concept has hardly found its way into common operating systems, as some radical modifications to the software architecture are required. An exception is the inclusion of the / proc file system in Linux and other operating systems, which gives all programs a uniform and mostly downward-compatible access option to data, such as B. number of running processes, system load, number of network connections, etc. allowed - all via the conventional file system interface . The idea of ​​“ everything is one file ” is carried on under Linux in the virtual file systems sysfs and configfs .

history

A number of well-known people were involved in the development of Plan 9, including Ken Thompson , who was temporarily head of the project and was involved in the first versions of Unix and the development of the C programming language .

  • Internal development began in 1987.
  • Productive use at Bell Labs began in 1989.
  • Plan 9 from Bell Labs First Edition appeared in 1993 and was only passed on to universities .
  • Plan 9 from Bell Labs Second Edition was released in 1995 and was available for purchase for $ 350.
  • Plan 9 from Bell Labs Third Edition (Brazil) was released on June 7, 2000 under the specially created Plan 9 license.
  • Plan 9 from Bell Labs Fourth Edition was published in April 2002 and brought fundamental changes with it. Among other things, 9P has been completely revised (for example by the introduction of long file names), fossil (a new file system) and venti (a backup server) have been added to the system and the installation routine has been significantly improved. From this version, Plan 9 is open source according to OSI and free software according to the definition of the Free Software Foundation .

In February 2014, Plan 9, which had previously been under the Lucent Public License , was also licensed under the GPL .

Spin-offs and descendants

  • 9front is a spin-off from Plan 9 that is under more intense maintenance.
  • Harvey is a fork that specializes in the AMD64 architecture and introduces support for the C compilers GCC and Clang to make porting existing applications easier.
  • Partly based on Harvey, Jehanne improves the compatibility of Plan 9 with the Portable Operating System Interface .
  • Plan 9 from User Space is a collection of many Plan 9 programs that have been ported to other operating systems.
  • Inferno was developed independently by Bell Labs. It combines many of the concepts of Plan 9 with a virtual machine integrated into the operating system , which enables execution on different architectures. Node 9 is again a fork that replaces this virtual machine with the one from LuaJIT .
  • 9vx runs on a virtualization layer through vx32 sandboxing.

literature

  • Hans-Peter Bischof, Gunter Imeyer, Bernhard Wellhöfer (née Kühl), Axel-Tobias Schreiner: The network operating system Plan 9. 1999, ISBN 3-446-18881-9 . The book is also available as a free download from the print-on-demand service provider Lulu.com .

Web links

Commons : Plan 9 (Operating System)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pro-Linux article Fork of Plan 9 published by Hans-Joachim Baader on July 19, 2011
  2. ↑ Nine Times: Plan 9 from the People's Front of cat-v.org (9front)
  3. ↑ Getting Plan 9 running on the Raspberry Pi - The Bendyworks Blog - Bendyworks - Ruby on Rails, iOS, & Clojure Consultants - Madison, WI. Retrieved October 1, 2013 .
  4. ↑ fossil(8)  -  Plan 9  - Man Page
  5. ↑ venti(8)  -  Plan 9  - Man Page
  6. ↑ Simon Sharwood: Plan 9 moves to GNU space. February 14, 2014, accessed February 14, 2014 .
  7. ↑ License text of Plan 9. Retrieved on February 14, 2014 : “The University of California, Berkeley, has been authorized by Alcatel-Lucent to release all Plan 9 software previously governed by the Lucent Public License, Version 1.02 under the GNU General Public License , Version 2. "
  8. ↑ 9FRONT.org. Retrieved October 12, 2018 .
  9. ^ Harvey OS. Retrieved October 12, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Jehanne. Retrieved October 12, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Plan 9 from User Space. In: GitHub . Retrieved October 12, 2018 .
  12. ↑ Free download