Design Concepts
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is like the Quakers: distinguished by its stress on the 'Inner Light,' noted for simplicity of life, in particular for plainness of speech. Like the Quakers, Plan 9 does not proselytize.
—Sape J. Mullender, Pierre G. Janson.Real Time in Real Operating System
Plan 9 is an evolution of UNIX design concepts:
- all objects are either files or file systems
- communication is over a network
- private namespaces allow their owners to access local and remote processes transparently
Plan 9 is a grid computing platform. It is an effort to provide a computing environment for geographically distributed clusters running on heterogeneous hardware, engineered for modern distributed environments and designed from the start to be a networked operating system. It can be installed as a self-contained system and used on a single computer, but also has the capability to separate its components between separate computers. In a typical Plan 9 installation, users work at terminals running rio, and they access CPU servers which handle computation-intensive processes. Permanent data storage is provided by additional network hosts acting as file servers and archival storage. Currently available desktop computers can emulate this architecture internally using multiple virtual machines.
Read more about this topic: Plan 9 From Bell Labs
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