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.
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.
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
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.
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
> 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.
If the shell's first read() reads 16 bytes (indicated above with "^"), then the file is changed, then the shell reads the rest; then the shell will see "echo $x; rm -rf /" regardless of whether or not it scans the input multiple times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We had to do some Plan 9 work, which makes sense when doing something new, but the actual Tailscale implementation is far _less_ work than for other Unixes.
This is so cool to see. Plan9 was a wonderful part of my COVID isolation, and I miss playing with it. This might have inspired me to spin up a 9front VM this weekend.
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.
Seems like the real story here is that the Plan 9 port of Go is not particularly healthy, and that it's easier to modify an OS kernel than it is to fix Go?
Seems like learning was done and fun was had, alongside some marketing content being produced. In turn, I got some learning done and some entertainment.
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...
I've never set up a Plan 9 system... does this allow the distributed systems communications to run through my Tailnet?
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.
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I think so! Caveat is I've never really used Plan 9 outside of single-user VMs.
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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...
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Russ Cox is an absolute legend for committing to this joke.
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.
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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
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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'!
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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
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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:
If the shell's first read() reads 16 bytes (indicated above with "^"), then the file is changed, then the shell reads the rest; then the shell will see "echo $x; rm -rf /" regardless of whether or not it scans the input multiple times.
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.
Could you expand more on what you would like out of an "enterprise Plan 9"?
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.
7 replies →
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.
We had to do some Plan 9 work, which makes sense when doing something new, but the actual Tailscale implementation is far _less_ work than for other Unixes.
It sounds like the Go compiler is better after this effort - fewer Plan 9 special cases in the code.
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.
wholly cow was not expecting them to patch the plan9 kernel to make this work
Why not though? Seems like relatively little amount of work was missing since clearly no one seriously done something like this before :)
> In 1999, Intel introduced the Pentium III processor with SSE instructions.
I kinda expected this paragraph to continue with
> This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Better than MMX at least.
This is so cool to see. Plan9 was a wonderful part of my COVID isolation, and I miss playing with it. This might have inspired me to spin up a 9front VM this weekend.
Note that the 9front patches to run Tailscale are still in progress. I was just told they'll be ready in a couple weeks.
For now only 9legacy (with all the latest changes) works.
> This might have inspired me to spin up a 9front VM this weekend.
Please do! Just be careful with your sysupdate.
Rob Pike is in shambles after this devastating betrayal
Not sure what the betrayal is? He contributed a quote for yesterday's post. https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-enterprise-plan-9-suppo...
from the above post:
Forward to the past?
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I'm sure it takes more than that to shamble an Olympic Silver Medal winner in archery.
Isn't that a joke.
He didn't actually go to the olympics.
https://wiki.c2.com/?RobPike
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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.
Please consider RISC OS next!
Three button mouse dependent UI solidarity!
Golang on RISC OS would be a truly ludicrous porting effort.
My employer-controlled browser won't let me access that URL. At first it was cert errors and now it's just blocked.
IME some web security gateways block the Tailscale domains entirely, presumably because it's a VPN that can bypass said gateway.
Weird. It's just Vercel on AWS. We have no alerts firing about any probers having cert errors or anything.
I wonder what your employer/policy doesn't like.
I've found that tailscale.com sometimes gets blocked by overzealous content filters as "VPN software".
Great, maybe Inferno as follow up?
Yet I still wonder how cool things would be if Plan9 was the most popular and used OS
I do expect tailscale drive shares to use 9P in that case ;-P
Indeed. We ran out of time :)
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.
Seems like the real story here is that the Plan 9 port of Go is not particularly healthy, and that it's easier to modify an OS kernel than it is to fix Go?
The Plan 9 port of Go _was_ not particularly healthy. It is now.
Fixing Go to not special case Plan 9 benefits all platforms--- all operating systems use the same code paths now, making the code simpler.
Plan 9 gets tailscale before a browser! Somehow this makes sense
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Seems like learning was done and fun was had, alongside some marketing content being produced. In turn, I got some learning done and some entertainment.
I think those are all benefits.
Also, portability is a sign of a rather sane codebase - good vibes for Tailscale !
Funny, I thought it was an interesting exercise.