This article is reproduced from Qubit, author Haonan Jia
Plan 9 operating system? never heard of that….
But the fact is that even Linux and Windows have to call it "Big Brother"!
That's right, this operating system developed by the "father of C language" 40 years ago is still deeply affecting Linux and Windows.
The latest news is that Bell Labs, which owns the copyright of Plan 9, has just announced the decentralization of copyright to the developer community.
In other words, Plan 9, a distributed operating system that has silently influenced the industry for 40 years, is about to officially "resurrect".
What does the Plan 9 system do?
The famous Bell Labs is the birthplace of the C language and Unix, the predecessor of the Linux system.
Of course, major inventions such as transistors, lasers, solar cells, light-emitting diodes, digital switches, communication satellites, electronic digital computers, cellular mobile communication equipment, long-distance television transmission, simulation languages, sound movies, stereo recordings, etc. were also born here.
As for the core developers of Unix and C, everyone is no stranger to it. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are both thrilling big names, and both won the Turing Award for these two achievements .
But what little outsiders know is that they also developed another set of operating system Plan 9 at Bell Labs in the 1980s.
In fact, Plan 9 was not the name of this system at the beginning, but the code name of this project. The name comes from the highly sought after science fiction film "Project Alien 9" in the history of film because of its "to the extreme".
It seems that the fathers of the C language are also hardcore science fiction fans~
After that, Bell Labs stopped investing in this project for various reasons. After the early R&D work was completed, the project was put on hold, and "Plan 9" gradually became the name of the system.
Why develop such a system? At that time, Ken and Dannis realized that distributed data storage and calling methods would become mainstream in the future, so a simple, elegant and practical system was needed to serve this demand.
The development of Plan 9 did not rely on any existing foundation of Unix, but started completely from scratch.
From the perspective of the time, Plan 9 was very advanced and advanced, and its model was completely different from traditional operating systems.
The structure of Plan 9 is a loosely coupled collection of services, which may be hosted on different machines.
The key concept is the name of the design space of each process: the service can be mapped to a fixed local name, therefore, even if the current service is provided with the same function other services can be replaced, use these services programs do not change.
Plan 9 is a real distributed operating system, not just a simple integration of several Unix functions. You can effortlessly execute any program on multiple hosts on the network, and you can use any resource of any host on the network, including files, processes, graphics, networks, and disks.
If Linux can work like this, no one needs Kubernetes.
In layman's terms, if "everything is a file" in Unix or Linux, then Plan 9 is "everything is a network file system."
If you have a laptop and a desktop computer, but only the desktop computer is connected to the printer, can you use the laptop to print directly?
In Linux, you must set up CUPS, open the network port, download the driver, and set up both machines to communicate with the printer.
In Plan 9, your laptop only needs to open the desktop printer file through the network to print.
How advanced is Plan 9? Although he himself was hidden by Bell Labs, many classic designs and ideas in Plan 9 have been used today.
Linux, Windows, and 5G all learn from Plan 9
Eric S. Raymond analyzed in his book why Plan 9 was finally discontinued.
He believes that Plan 9 will eventually fail simply because it is not sufficiently sophisticated. At that time, although Unix seemed to be broken and obviously lacking, it was still able to get the job done, which was enough to keep its position.
The groundbreaking Plan 9 ultimately failed to "take off", but its innovation was adopted by many commercial operating systems.
For example, the widely popular concept of providing operating system services through the file system in Linux comes from Plan 9.
In addition, Plan 9's minimalist window system design has been borrowed by countless systems, including Windows:
The UTF-8 character encoding commonly used in browsers today was originally invented for Plan 9 and implemented for the first time in Plan 9.
The distributed design of Plan 9 is also continued in Nokia-Bell Labs projects, such as World Wide Streams. This stream processing program is today deployed on multiple 5G edge cloud and core cloud computing nodes geographically separated. .
It can be said that today's popular microservice architecture was proposed in Plan 9 decades ago.
From this perspective, Plan 9 has never really "retired".
For decades, private enthusiasts have spontaneously formed a community to develop Plan 9, but recently, Bell Labs officially announced the complete "resurrection" of Plan 9, and directly delegated the copyright to the developer community.
What to do after Plan 9 is resurrected?
The developer community officially recognized by Bell Labs, called the Plan 9 Foundation, was organized by fans from the bottom up and was just established in September 2020.
The foundation's homepage only states that it will be committed to the development and application of Plan 9 in the future, and the specific work plan has not yet been released.
Bell Labs also seems uncertain about how useful Plan 9 will be in the future.
They said in the official statement:
Bell Labs is very supportive of the open source community, and Plan 9 may benefit the global software development community.
Who knows, maybe Plan 9 will become part of the emerging distributed cloud infrastructure, supporting the upcoming industrial revolution.
Well, it seems that Bell Labs intends to "release" Plan 9 completely.
I just don't know, if Plan 9 can really become a climate and an operating system with huge influence in the future, will Bell Labs regret today's decision?
Finally, present an egg.
Dennis Ritchie, one of the developers of Plan 9, and the main inventor of the C language, is a very legendary computer scientist.
How legendary is it? Among the big computer guys, he is the only one without a doctorate.
Moreover, he gave up his doctorate for a "very headstrong" reason.
Reference link: https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/plan-9-bell-labs-cyberspace/