Yet another operating system has been ported to the Raspberry Pi. No, it’s not Haiku, sadly, but it is something just as weird and interesting. This time it’s Plan 9 from Bell Labs, an 80’s era OS from the same company that brought you C and Unix.
As a research operating system, Plan 9 has a bunch of really weird, but useful features. For one, everything about a computer running Plan 9 is distributed; the memory can be running on one machine, the processor on another, and the display can run on yet another machine. This modularity gives Plan 9 the honorable title of, ‘more Unix than Unix’.
Another great feature, although somewhat of a historical note, is that Plan 9’s graphics capabilities are written into the kernel, unlike Linux and X where the display manager is floating around in user space.
It’s an interesting system, and if you’ve got enough Raspis to build your own supercomputer you might want to install Plan 9 on a few of your nodes, just to see what the future computer of ages past looked like.
How cool is that. I want to pick up a few more Raspi’s just to try it out.
better to try the live cd on your pc…
Good to see Glenda.
Is that the little rabbit thing? I don’t know why, but that thing just makes me angry.
http://hackaday.com/2012/12/01/raspberry-pi-quadcopter
After reading the last two articles,
Now, I don’t feel so good….
SkyNET anyone?
Is the graphic drivers (if it is still drivers) being actively updated?
There isn’t much that can be updated.. the “drivers” are a shim.. all of the work is still done in the binary that is loaded onto the GPU. This is the exact reason people called them out on the announcement.
Plan 9 has its own graphics driver which is not a “shim” and makes no use of the GPU except to ask for the address of the raw framebuffer. It’s 2D and non-accelerated, but there are no secret bits.
That little blob is still a huge mystery to me.
Plan9 was way ahead of its time IMHO. it is great to see people still porting it and using it.
So Plan 9 is “an 80′s era OS”, “the future computer of ages past”? Although with not a fast pace like Linux and the BSD’s, it’s still being developed.
Woot!
Plan 9 was intended to be the successor to Unix by Bell Labs. Unfortunately the system was blown up before it was finished.