Comment by packetlost

Comment by packetlost 2 days ago

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.

moody__ 2 days ago

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.

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zozbot234 2 days ago

> 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.
It should not be a huge deal of effort since as you mention the plan9 syscall API is simpler than on Linux. The added plan9 support could then also serve as a kind of "toy" backend that could make the rest of the code more understandable in other ways.
I'd even argue that OP's early experiment with such a port of tailscale shows precisely such an outcome.

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- adriangrigore a day ago
  
  The problem is porting the compilers! There is no C++ compiler on Plan 9.
  
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  packetlost a day ago
  
  Yeah, but also the type of person who is going to use Plan 9 isn't going to want to write C++, of all languages.
  The general problem stands though, almost no languages support Plan 9
  
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packetlost 2 days ago

> There aren't really union filesystems per se, the plan 9 kernel provides unions through its namespace model.
Yes, this is what I'm referring to. It's really many filesystems unioned into one namespace that is controllable per-process.
> 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?
I didn't say I had any issues, I said I preferred them! Aside from a lack of familiarity and needing to install plan9ports on other systems, I haven't had issues.
> 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.
Right, language support is the biggest issue with running on Plan 9 from that perspective, at least for "server" workloads. Excluding graphical APIs, the basic stuff (file IO, networking, etc.) isn't all that hard to add to a language (it of course depends). The real trouble is things that have no equivalent in Plan 9, such as mmap and shm.
> 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.
This is also what Oxide is doing. Their rack's OS is IllumOS but their customers are expected to only interface with the OS via their tooling and instead provision VMs.
> It's hard to make the plan 9 backplane better enough to warrant dealing with integrating the guest and host environment
If I were doing it, I would do it the other way! Run Plan 9 in a backplane/hypervisor and target it from the language level. The nice part is the systems programming model!

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- zozbot234 2 days ago
  
  > Excluding graphical APIs, the basic stuff (file IO, networking, etc.) isn't all that hard to add to a language (it of course depends).
  You could implement a modern graphical API on top of virtio-gpu, which would give you low-level access to accelerated graphics.
  > The real trouble is things that have no equivalent in Plan 9, such as mmap and shm.
  Some uses of mmap and shm actually seem to have a near-equivalent already in plan9's segattach. Other uses would require some implementation of distributed shared memory (i.e. implementing the usual CPU concurrency model over the network) to be made feasible while keeping to the usual networked-OS focus of plan9.
  
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  packetlost a day ago
  
  Right, you could do it... maybe. Some languages/libraries/runtimes could have specific expectations around the specifics of mmap that can't easily be papered over, but I suspect it would be a minority of cases
  
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