Plan 9 is a distributed system built at the Computing Sciences Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories over the last few years. Its goal is to provide a production-quality system for software development and general computation using heterogeneous hardware and minimal software. A Plan 9 system comprises CPU and file servers in a central location connected together by fast networks. Slower networks fan out to workstation-class machines that serve as user terminals. Plan 9 argues that given a few carefully implemented abstractions it is possible to produce a small operating system that provides support for the largest systems on a variety of architectures and networks. The foundations of the system are built on two ideas: a per-process name space and a simple message-oriented file system protocol.
Plan 9 is a distributed system built at the Computing Sciences Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories over the last few years. Its goal is to provide a productionquality system for software development and general computation using heterogeneous hardware and minimal software. A Plan 9 system comprises CPU and file servers in a central location connected together by fast networks. Slower networks fan out to workstation-class machines that serve as user terminals. Plan 9 argues that given a few carefully implemented abstractions it is possible to produce a small operating system that provides support for the largest systems on a variety of architectures and networks. The foundations of the system are built on two ideas: a per-process name space and a simple message-oriented file system protocol.The operating system for the CPU servers and termivals is structured as a traditional kernel: a single compiled image containing code for resource management, process control, user processes, virtual memory, and I/O. Because the file server is a separate machine, the file system is not compiled in, although the management of the name space, a per-process attribute, is. The entire kernel for the multiprocessor SGI Power
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