When making changes to my lib/profile file, I would like to "reload" it similar to linux where I can exec source $HOME/.bashrc. I know that 9front is different since the rio session is based on the profile (I think).

Is there an easy way to reload the profile file without doing fshalt -r to just reboot?

I'm having trouble getting 9front to boot on a pi400. I've found and tried numerous confit.txt examples but so far none of them are working. I'm currently getting a firmware not found error.

Hi, I'd like to lurk around and learn from plan9 users. Is the 9fans Discord server still online? All the links I found were expired.

I know there's IRC... I just don't have a bouncer and I'm not connected that much.

Has anyone attempted to install (plan)9(front) on the newer MS surface with the Qualcomm ARM cpu?

With drivers for the cell modem, it could be a dream machine...

Plan9 has like 38 syscalls, which means that all other operations available via syscalls in OSs like Linux must be done in terms of file operations, and that can lead to a lot of open/close syscalls, so there's not only the overhead of the context switching but also whatever bookkeeping operations the kernel makes with the file descriptors.

So, instead of only making 1 context switch to get access to a certain functionality, now a program must make 3 context switches and 2 bookkeeping operations on the file descriptors to get the same.

So I'm wondering what's the impact of this overhead, and if (and what) actions have Plan9 done to mitigate it.

Often when i try to start a web-browser in 9legacy/9front, it never works due to the webFS not being initiated beforehand. webFS is needed for any HTML browsers in plan9, but when i'd tried looking for a way to start webFS, results came up empty.

Is there a simple foolproof way to start up webFS? While i had more experience with plan9 over the years, i'm still new in some aspects, and one of those is starting up a virtual filesystem (that in ways acts like a driver on other systems) like webFS.

Hey everyone, just got around to my first bare-metal install of 9front last night. Are there any useful settings or programs to change/build post-install? I've already set up wifi.

My FOSDEM talk inspired in part by a conversation in here did in fact go ahead.

https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3095-one-way-forward-finding-a-path-to-what-comes-after-unix/

It seemed to go down well with the 9front folks in attendance -- I even went for a beer with them afterwards!

I turned it into no less than 4 Reg articles in the end...

P1: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/12/drowning_in_code/

P2: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/what_is_unix/

P3: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/21/successor_to_unix_plan_9/

P4 (a sort of epilogue): https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/23/linux_built_for_a_vm/

What would be different about the Internet if Plan9 was used instead Linux or BSD servers?

can someone explain to me what are the differences between the 2 and wheter i should use one or the other? i started with RM's pi port because that was the first thing i got exposed to (through a blog talking about plan9) but when looking up certain information i noticed that not everytthing seems to match up with what the instructions are saying and i've come to understand that this is due to the plan9 vs 9front divergence but im not very clear as to what ar the core diffs and which one is worth using on pi to learn about plan9?

thank you 🙂

i recently got interested in plan9 and installed Richard Miller's image on my raspberry pi but i'm finding it extremely hard to do anything at all or understand what even am i supposed to do.

I have a basic knowledge of unix but not much about how the actual OS is put together or what are the building blocks, i'm not a systems engineer or anything, i'm mainly a javsacript developer (can also code some basic C ) and artist that is increasingly interested in learning the more fundamental side of computing and exploring the lesser known spaces.

I feel extremely inadequate to learn how to use plan9 and i wonder if i should just not bother for now, and focus on learning other things before i get back to it.

which is where my question lies, what would be some pre-requisites that would benefit me greatly in learning how to use plan9? or is it normal to feel this completely lost.

I have been doing the Googling thing and haven't found an answer for my question. I was just curious if there as a C++ compiler available for the system.

I have a computer I've been using as a file+auth server and a raspberry pi out in my garage I've been using as a terminal, both on my local network, obviously. I would like to set up some way to access the file server from outside my local network, ultimately to be able to boot a terminal from outside as well. I know with Linux, it's common to use a vpn or reverse proxy server to do file access.

Has someone done something similar with plan9 or 9front? I vaguely recall reading something where Rob Pike mentioned a 'viaduct' machine at Bell Labs that was something like a vpn...

Most of what I've seen with vpn setups seem to require specific software on both ends, while the reverse proxy is just on a local server.

Am I overcomplicating this? I get the sneaking suspicion it's much simpler and I'm just missing something. Any ideas where to start looking?

This is something I had thought lots about since first seeing Hugo Landau's write-ups on The PowerPC AS Tagged Memory Extensions and The Talos II, Blackbird POWER9 support for it, which is something I care about as ppc64el aficionado. Most PowerPC distributions these days are exclusively little-endian (and so are all POWER9-derived systems in normal operation.) However, turns out there's great benefit in running it in big-endian, as that opens the door to leverage 1 bit of ECC memory per 16-byte word for memory tagging. Memory Tagging Extension has recently made rounds part of new, revised armv9 architecture, notably bringing MTE to Pixel 8 devices & hence making it the first handset to support memory tagging technology. Who knew that this isn't a novelty, but something that IBM has largely figured out in the 90s?

There's something about POWER9 design that rings Plan 9.

And it's not in the name.

IBM POWER9 and Talos II / Blackbird remains arguably the most secure & otherwise free server-grade hardware platform, offering performance such that cannot be matched by alternative open architectures such as RISC-V. I deliberated over this for a long time, when I had also learnt that 9front SGI Indy kernel did run in big-endian! Now, what if it could be adapted to leverage PowerAS memory tagging capability?

Well, that would certainly interested, but there's one snag:

Tags Active provides no security. (huh?) It is vital to note that nothing about these ISA extensions provides any kind of security invariant against a party which can generate arbitrary machine code, even if only in unprivileged mode. The tagged memory extensions don't stop you from doing anything. As such, they can principally be viewed as providing a performance enhancement for the IBM i operating system, which uses these instructions to keep track of pointer validity. It is the IBM i OS which enforces security invariants, for example by always following every pointer LQ with a TXER.

And this is where it really rings Plan 9 for me.

I can definitely imagine a virtualisation layer (think vmx) that would be capable of performing trusted (JIT?) compilation and machine translation so as to maintain the invariant where it otherwise wouldn't be feasible.

How far out am I?

Hi, I would like to know the story behind, or the meaning of the #cat-v propaganda picture on 9front.org, if possible.

I know the site cat-v.org and a bit about Uriel, from reading from that and other sites. And I have always found them interesting.

Does someone know what the picture ”means”? I myself have always imagined the commando in diving gear representing Uriel, telling some hard truths to the other guy in the picture. But what is the real meaning? Does someone know?

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The Plan 9 Foundation is now recognized as a 501(c)((3) organization by the IRS. Among other things, that means donations by US taxpayers are tax deductible and we're eligible for a whole bunch of employer match programs. Yay!

https://plan9foundation.org/20231212-501c3.html

If you'd like to skip to the part where you donate, you can go here:

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/25fe42cb-e841-497d-94b0-c05a3a5bb153

Hey all, can I get some confirmation that 9p.io is down for everyone? I'm not totally sure who to reach out to that can correct it but I hope it stays afloat.

My father-in-law is a retired Bell Labs engineer who was using Plan9 on his ancient tower PC with monochrome monitor, but for various reasons he no longer has access to that hardware. About 10 years ago he got a version running within Terminal on a Mac laptop, but when that computer died he was not able to get it to working correctly on his new MacBook Pro. He thought he might have better luck on a PC, so he bought a refurbished Lenovo IdeaPad Flex5 running Windows 11 expressly for this purpose. But his vision is fading and he is 90 so he was not able to get Plan9 up and running without help. He enlisted me - I'm an ophthalmologist, but have an engineering background. I have never used Plan9 but I know enough to be dangerous (as you'll see below.) I read a lot of what is available in this group and I found (and watched) a 2-hour YouTube video about installing on a PC, but I'm still stuck. So... please be patient with me for my ignorance.

For the first try, I installed VirtualBox in Win11 and ran 9Front inside of VirtualBox. At first it would not run - the shell was there, but even simple commands like "date" gave a file error. Eventually (dumb luck?) I got it working, sort of. Some of the commands worked, but not all. Date, LS worked fine, but the text editor didn't work the way we expected. You could type in the upper box but it wouldn't accept commands in the lower box. Anyway, my father-in-law had some trouble capturing and uncapturing the mouse within the VM because of his age and vision. After kicking around with it for a while, we decided to abandon the virtual machine.

Second try: Went to the Vita Nuova site to get a shrink-wrapped box with CD, etc., but they no longer offer that option. Tried to find it on eBay, but all I could find were DVDs of the Plan9 from Outer Space movie, presumably the namesake of this software.

Third try: Went to 9p.io and downloaded the USB disk image to boot from that. Went into BIOS to set up to boot from the USB image. Restarted and... nothing. It almost bricked the laptop. After a few tries and several minutes, the BIOS screen finally came up, but Windows11 is gone for good. I don't plan to reinstall Windows since the point of the machine is to run Plan9.

I should probably just give up here because I don't think I have the technical skills to get any flavor of Plan9 running on his laptop, but how can you deprive a 90-year-old Bell Labs engineer of his Plan9?

Thanks.