Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
(tailscale.com)348 points by adriangrigore a day ago
348 points by adriangrigore a day ago
Yes, you could do something like keep a small root fs or pack everything into the kernels paqfs to boot into a Tailscale VPN and pull root from another 9 machine on the VPN. Then pull resources in from other machines including non 9 systems.
Either way it makes VPN easy between 9 and non 9 machines. Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace. But that makes seamless Unix and Windows comms difficult.
> Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace
Note that one of Tailscale's main party tricks is NAT traversal, when both machines are behind different NATs and can't otherwise get a connection open to each other. (And then Tailscale ultimately falls back to a relay server on the internet if it can't get a direct connection for IP packets)
We actually have that nowadays... the config file support to tailscaled, as Irbe mentioned on the bug Jan 2024: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1412#issuecomm...
Someone needs to convince Russ that it would be hilarious to have a full featured web browser in Plan 9.
On 9 front there's vmx which is hardware virtualization. You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window.
I'd also like to point out that most users of Plan 9 dislike web technology because it's a giant nightmare of code. No one human can even begin to comprehend the code base of Chrome, let alone Firefox - programs that are as big, if not bigger than the kernels they run on. That is an absurd state to be in - your runtime requires a billion dollar company to maintain. Even open source Firefox needs millions in funding.
Whereas a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space. That's the runtime I want, something I can understand. The process is the container on plan 9 so you have everything you need to build distributed apps without a web browser. It's human scale distributed computing. I'd like a future without the "modern" corporate scale web.
Oh yes I absolutely agree. I would definitely like to completely replace the web. It's just that in order to (currently) do my banking, pay my bills, book airline tickets, order from Amazon, etc. I must use a browser. If I could escape all that I would run Plan 9 exclusively without another OS or hacks to access a browser from another OS/virtual machine.
You can, just not all at once.
And which plan 9 release and when? Ghostscript and Python were originally distributed with 9front which are both HUGE compared to the rest of the system. Remove those and its much, much smaller. Unsure if ghostscript was included in vanilla 9 from the labs. Python was included in 9front because it was necessary for mercurial. Once git9 arrived python was nuked from base and removed many lines of code. Ghostscript is next to go from base once pdffs is running (patches welcome.)
> You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window.
Not only is the VNC redirection unnecessary, so it is the entire filesystem. You could just render the vm directly to the window and boot a read only image. Plus then you don't have to deal with VNC.
Doesn’t plan9 support frame buffers over 9p or something like that? You could probably write a wrapper that just forwards a Linux browser to a plan9 window
This has been done already: https://github.com/aiju/jsdrawterm
There are solutions, like VNC to some UNIX-ish machine, but, yeah, a native browser would be cool! 9front has a hypervisor, you could run something in there. https://man.9front.org/1/vmx
So, something I’m thinking about here is that the 9p vision has always seemed really cool to me: expose all the resources in the network in a unified way that enables the whole network to be used as if it was a single computer. But, since this is a protocol-oriented vision of computing, it enables arbitrary implementers of the protocol to participate “natively”, even if they aren’t actually plan9 systems.
Many years ago a roommate and I had an HPUX machine running IE on HPUX just so we could forward X session to our FreeBSD and Linux desktops and not have to use our Windows machine for anything other than PC games.
It's probably easier to just run a VM directly into a window.
Yeah, convince Russ and some investors! :D I would laugh my ass off for years at this joke! Yeah, please do this next year's April Fools'!
Atp it's probably easier to just smash firefox/linux into a vm
I unironically wish there was an enterprise version of Plan 9. I've been writing most of my scripts in `rc` (something my coworkers put up with because we use nix and I can pull it in automatically with dirnev) and it has been great.
I would worry less about other people being able to run rc scripts and more about them being able to read/edit them.
they're routinely very short, and the only non-obvious syntax for someone familiar with a C-like language is the ~ command and redirecting to stderr. They're pretty much always easier to read (and write) than bash scripts in general because of how little weird/surprising syntax there is. Not being a derivative of ALGOL has its perks.
Most scripts are write-once:read-never, especially if you actually implement -h/--help
> Most scripts are write-once:read-never, especially if you actually implement -h/--help
I guess the answer is always “it depends”, but that generally has never been my experience with most things. Are you over-engineering the shit out of every script to the degree the script itself is a Turing complete machine and with enough —-help flags anything is possible? Most 40+ year old Unix tools with a thousand flags have their limits and you have to script around them to achieve things you want.
In my experience, eventually a business need will arise that require you to change a script. Are your coworkers comfortable changing these scripts or are you in the mind set of “that’s a simple enough change, I’ll do it”
One benefit of rc is this[1]:
> The most important principle in rc’s design is that it’s not a macro processor. Input is never scanned more than once by the lexical and syntactic analysis code
I worked at a unix shop that deleted most of a working drive because a shell script was modified while it was running. Luckily they kept daily backups on tape. This was about 17 years ago.
[1] https://www.scs.stanford.edu/nyu/04fa/sched/readings/rc.pdf
Scanning input just is unrelated to the "modified while running" problem. The "modified while running" problem is a read-buffering problem.
For example, consider the following change:
-echo $x; rm -rf /n/foobar/
+rm -rf /n/foobar/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I am unfamiliar with the read-buffering done by either of the 2 main implementations of rc, and so am unable to comment on whether it does things to avoid this problem. But if it does do things to avoid it, those things are orthogonal to the "not a macro processor / input is never scanned more than once" thing.
the distributed computing model is pretty nice in theory (maybe not in practice) and the uniform system APIs are also nice. The userspace tools in particular are just plain better (structured regex commands are quite a bit better than ed-style and I find myself using them far more frequently in vis than I do in vim, they're far more composable and intuitive).
The biggest thing is the heavy reliance on union file systems (and file systems in general) and an extremely simple syscall API. It's a heterogeneous-networked-node OS so it handles realistic workloads natively with primitives designed for it instead of piling complexity on top of Unix-like APIs (ie. Linux). I dunno, I just think a lot of the modern "cloud native" stack is unnecessary if you had an OS actually built for the workloads we have.
There aren't really union filesystems per se, the plan 9 kernel provides unions through its namespace model. In my opinion part of the reason why the userspace tools can be as nice as they are, are due to the use of file system interfaces and the simplistic syscall API. Could you elaborate more on the issues you see with the use of these?
In regards to using it for a "cloud native" stack, the issue is that people want to run code that isn't designed for Plan 9. You could build whatever backplane type thing you want out of plan 9 but the end goal is still likely to be to run some web app or REST api server. Unless someone does a great deal of effort to port all of those environments that people want (nodejs, modern python, etc) you're going to be stuck using a VM and losing a lot of the benefit.
This feels similar to what Joyent did with lxzones in SmartOS, where the backplane was solaris based but the apps they were running for clients were using Linux. It's hard to make the plan 9 backplane better enough to warrant dealing with integrating the guest and host environment.
It could be used to replace k8s-based deployments (also Docker Swarms, etc.) since system interfaces on Plan 9 are namespaced and containerized "out-of-the-box" as part of its basic design (and this is one of the most prominent additions compared to *NIX). It's not a hacked-on feature as with Linux.
In case y'all missed it in the first post, and you just want to try this out, it's working in this v86 image:
https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=custom&m=768&vram=16&hda.url=ht...
You can start tailscaled and tailscale inside the VM. It may take a while to come online sometimes due to limited proxy availability.
Edit: alt gives you the third button. To start a terminal, hold alt and right click, select new, release alt, and right click drag to size the terminal window.
Webinar in progress (Google Meet) https://ftp.plan9.ts.net/webinar
It just wrapped up, for those who would have otherwise been interested.
I like the premise of the joke, but then as the explanation ran on... I suddenly became depressed. So much broken stuff, so much complexity.... to, what, make a network tunnel? If all this extra work was the joke, that would be funny.
Why not though? Seems like relatively little amount of work was missing since clearly no one seriously done something like this before :)
God I love plan9. Making my own os using many of its principles is a retirement project life goal.
EDIt: I reserve the name “chaos10” for this project, since - like SerenityOS - there will be no plan.
Not sure what the betrayal is? He contributed a quote for yesterday's post. https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-enterprise-plan-9-suppo...
The 9fans list had this one for April Fools:
Given the huge maintenance cost of immature computer architectures such as mips, 386, arm, arm64 and amd64, we decided to put our focus on the more mature and stable achitectures:
power64 and itanuim.
Therefore, all architectures other than power64 and itanium are thereby frozen, conserved and promoted to end of life.
rsc, rob pike, and bradfitz are three people I could talk to for hours, completely wasting their time, especially about Plan9.
That OS fascinates me.
I remember early in my career when an expert I worked with could sit with me and patiently show me how to do something and let me ask questions for however long it took me to understand well enough what to do and how to swim if I fell in the deep end of whatever they wanted me to do. It was some of the fastest upskilling that I have ever done in my career, like getting a bachelors degree worth of very specific knowledge in three hours.
I don’t know C and I don’t know enough about Plan 9 to use it productively for anything, but it has some extremely cool and useful features that I want to know more about and learn how to use, even if it is only so that I can lament the non-existence of those features in the big three operating systems today.
If I had the money I would probably pay to get face time with all three of those folks for expanding my Go knowledge and rsc and rob pike for the plan 9 understanding that I have always wanted, but have never been able to give myself.
Plan 9 gets tailscale before a browser! Somehow this makes sense
Happy to answer any questions!
A bunch of us are currently in https://meet.google.com/qre-gydb-mkv chatting about this. (Edit: the hour is over; we all left)
The earlier Apr 1st blog post was https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-enterprise-plan-9-suppo...