Yeah I couldn’t access it either, Wayback archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20220403200715/https://9p.io/sys...

That is the best security.

Next up in the blog schedule: "Performance and Scaling in Plan 9"

Already done.

https://orib.dev/9hack1.html

Still WIP. We're not yet at a million useful procs.

Ah, by "Already done" I was referring to to the fact that your blog post exists and addresses the performance issues :-)

I'd actually love to see such a paper. Plan 9 threading is more like coroutines, but it is certainly possible to run multi-core/multi-process code.

That said, I can't say I've seen anyone try to write anything that scales like nginx on Plan 9. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, I've just not seen anyone talk about it too much.

It did run on IBM's Blue Gene for a bit (https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix07/posters/vanhens...) but as you can see that was some 15 years ago, and I'm not sure we're talking about anything even remotely similar to a single computer handling tons of concurrent connections.

Plan 9 can also run Go binaries, but, again, not really sure we're talking about the same thing as nginx-level scale.

> I'd actually love to see such a paper. Plan 9 threading is more like coroutines, but it is certainly possible to run multi-core/multi-process code.

Rob Pike was on of the main developers behind plan 9 and Go and involved in concurrent programming research focusing on CSP.

Multi-processing was a main focus of plan 9's design and it works well as procs are cheap to spawn on plan 9. Procs are also the smallest unit of execution on plan 9, threads are just light weight procs with a shared heap to pass pointers around. Thread stacks can also be shared as well by being allocated on the heap via fork(2) RFMEM flag (its all done with malloc in the background).

The issue with vanilla (aka labs or legacy ) plan 9 is there is a hard coded limit of 2k procs statically allocated at boot. This was a pragmatic design decision. The unfortunate side effect is vanilla plan 9 falls over under any sort of work load requiring spawning lots of procs like handling web requests. This is actively being worked on by 9front developers so sites hosted on 9front should hold up better (patches welcome :-).

> That said, I can't say I've seen anyone try to write anything that scales like nginx on Plan 9.

Because you really don't need those big web serving monoliths on plan 9. You wire things up using rc scripts and programs like execfs (implements cgi) plus httpd/tcp80 or another web serving listener and sandbox code using namespaces. Plan 9 is more true to unix philosophy and more unix than unix. (edit: execfs is experimental but available on shuthub.us along with other webstuff like tcp80)

And also Limbo and Inferno, Plan 9's sucessor that people keep forgeting about and heavily influenced Go.

https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html

rfork is also just a really elegant system call

Plan9 libthread is literally goroutines just without the syntax sugar - up till version 1.5, golang shipped significant chunk of Plan9 standard library with itself. It's also where the saner networking interface came from, as Plan9 was to support networking from start, not depend on quick and dirty port of non-Unix stack like BSD Sockets

It got taken care of in Limbo and Inferno, Plan 9's sucessor that people keep forgeting about and heavily influenced Go.

https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html

Here ya go

http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/e938acc8ff64a3cb...

Weird to link to the raw troff. One you install 9front or plan 9, you run mk in /sys/doc to render into readable ps/pdf/html documents.

It seems to go down every time something on it is submitted to Hacker News. Give it a few hours and try again.

Hosted on a plan9 system

And? One can run a not-so-scalable web server on any OS last time I checked.

Ease up, I'm quite sure it was a joke.

Would love to "Lego" block build hardware and software components on the following stack:

1. RK3588 Rockchip 12in Thinkpad cross HTC style slideout keyboard form factor 2. Plan 9 Legacy OS 3. seL4 microkernel, Qi cross Racket IDE

and to compete what people can do scaling out to the "cloud" at price thresholds, maybe a gifted individual or team will realise the 2100 movie's HAL9000 sentience.

It would have been funny for a blip but this has been front page for >6 hours and it's still down