Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Introduction

Plan 9 from Bell Labs (here on referred to simply as Plan 9) is a Distributed Operating system created by the Computing Science Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories, Which was also the group that developed Unix, and the C programming language[3]. It was first released in 1993 to various universities, and given a full release to the general public in 1995[3]. The most unique and interesting aspect of Plan 9 is that it represents all system interfaces via the filesystem including things not normally treated as files, like networking and the user interface.[3] That is to say, everything can be treated like a file, and thus can have read and write operations preformed on it. You would for instance, write Data to the network as though it were a file, and another computer would read that data. It was designed to be used in a distributed capacity, with some central computers for computation, a File server and many terminals for access, all of which is treated as one large system.

This report will go through the various aspects of the Plan 9 operating system and it's Distributed Operating system properties. Plan 9 was envisioned with 3 primary goals in mind, and this report will go into detail on each. First, All resources of the system should be represented as files in the filesystem[3]. Second, Given Application view should see an entire system as belonging to a single coherent namespace.[3] This should be independent of whether or not a given resource is local or remotely accessed. Two given namespaces might not show the same data, but all the data a given application or system sees should be presented as one namespace. Finally, all communication should be done via a standard communication protocol, which is called 9P. This report will also go over how a standard plan9 network would be set up, and my failed attempts to set up a plan9 network myself.