New alpha driver for Marvell Yukon 2 Ethernet (2010/01/23)

Erik released a new alpha driver for Marvell Yukon 2 Ethernet NICs.

From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@qua...>
Subject: yukon 2 alpha driver
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:15:50 -0500

is anyone interested in testing a marvell yukon 2
driver?  i am currently working with a 88e5057
(1186/4b00, dge-560t).  but most single-port yukon 2
parts should work fine.  if so. please contact me
off list.

- erik

You can install it from contrib with

term% contrib/install quanstro/yuk

This will install two files, etheryuk.c and yukdump.h, into your /sys/src/9/pc directory.

Edit /sys/src/9/pc/pcf and add the following line to the list of Ethernet devices:

    etheryuk        pci

After that compile your new kernel by running

mk 'CONF=pcf'

Then copy the new kernel into /n/9fat and boot with it.

On my ASUS A8R32-MVP with 88E8053 chip the following new device will now show up:

#l0: yuk: 1000Mbps port 0xDFEFC000 irq 4: 00173137b3d3

I tested it during the last several days and it works great, good work!

Please send your feedback and bug reports to Erik.

Flying mplayers in a Plan 9 (2009/09/07)

cinap_lenrek has done it again, he has brought linuxemu to the next level and now it can run mplayer!

So you can enjoy watching flying saucers in Plan 9[1] in Plan 9[2] (not a typo).

This uses fgb's equis X server and will hog your CPU, but this are small sacrifices in order to bring your favorite Glenda pr0n to Plan 9.

And another screenshot of mplayer and equis in all their glory.

• [1]: From Outer Space
• [2]: From Bell Labs

Howto Backup your Venti to Blu-Ray Disks (2009/08/10)

Some months ago Geoff Collyer added a paper to the Plan 9 distribution (/sys/doc/backup.ms) describing the backup scheme they currently use at Bell Labs.

It explains procedure to store your Venti arenas in Dual-Layer Blu-Ray disk, and how to recover in case of an apocalyptic disaster strike.

Manual Pages Archive (2009/08/05)

A new web archive of man(1) pages has been added to the family of cat-v.org projects at: http://man.cat-v.org.

It has been online for some months, but the 'official' public launch has been prompted by Fish's contribution of the fascinating Research Unix 8th Edition manuals (including some commands from Unix Writer's Workbench manuals!).

Besides that the archive so far it includes the following manuals:

• Plan 9 (Second Edition and the latest release) and p9p.
• Inferno from the latest hg tip.
• Plan B first and second editions.

Contributions of further manuals (specially historical ones) that are currently missing are very welcome.

Glendy - The Game (2009/08/05)

Andrey Mirtchovski has written a fun little game where you are tasked with 'stopping Glenda from running away in the field of dead operating systems'.

For more info and the source see the Glendy website.

Announcing the first Hungarian Plan 9 mailing list (2009/08/01)

Harka Győző at the University of Pécs has just started a new mailing list for the Hungarian fans of Plan 9. We discuss topics about our favorite operating system in our native language. You can join us at: https://omega.ttk.pte.hu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/9rajong

Scheme 9 from Empty Space (2009/07/19)

Nils M Holm's Scheme 9 from Empty Space (s9fes) "is an interpreter for a broad subset of R4RS Scheme". It currently functions on several operating systems, including -- albeit, "experimentally" -- Plan 9. Perhaps the GSoC group working on achieving a similar feat can take something from this, as it is a clean and working implementation. Try it for yourself!

MySQLfs for Plan 9 (2009/07/17)

Steve Simon released a while ago a mysqlfs for Plan 9 modeled after odbc(10.4) in Inferno.

It is available using the sources/contrib packaging system as steve/mysqlfs.

From the 'Is it April 1st already?' department... (2009/07/10)

Plan 42 is a new OS by Andy Elvey that treats 'everything as a file' and seems to take more than a bit of inspiration from Plan 9.

What makes it (as boyd would have put it) so 'fascinating' is that it is implemented in Python and C++ and uses "whefs" (Wandering Horse Embedded File System) as its main storage file system.

Among other things it seems to include:

• A clone of the plumber
• A port of Newsham's Python 9P library to C++
• A clone of fossil called 'trilobite'

The currently 'pre-alpha' project is released to the public domain.

And given its claims that "it's all about having fun", who can criticize it?

More info at its github page: http://github.com/mooseman/plan_42/tree/master

More 4th IWP9 info and Call for Papers (2009/06/27)

Erik Quanstrom has announced further details about the next International Workshop for Plan 9 and Inferno.

The official dates are from October 21 to 23 and the event will be hosted by the great folks at Coraid.

Papers in the usual Plan 9 style should be sent to iwp9paper at quanstro.net by the end of August. Work In Progress reports are also encouraged in a similar format to the papers but limited to less than three pages (and the deadline for this is instead the fifth of October).

The registration deadline for attending the workshop is 28th of September, attendance is free, as usual, just remember to bring your Glenda t-shirt ;)

For the full details see the official website and the 2009 page at iwp9.cat-v.org.

Update: Corrected dates, they are from Wednesday 21 to Friday 23, not 22-24 as had been reported earlier.

Plan 9 Workshops Around the World (2009/06/10)

International Workshop for Plan 9 (and Inferno) aka IWP9 news:

• First two audio recordings from IWP9 2008 are now available in mp3. Thanks to sqweek for doing the conversion and audio editing. Recordings of the lighting talks will be published as soon as I can find them again.

• Brucee and co. had their own IWP9 down under in March.

• The Fourth International Workshop for Plan 9 and Inferno is being planned with the help of Coraid and will take place in Athens GA, USA this October, more details will be posted when available.

Big Blue calls for Interns from Outer Space (2009/05/27)

Eric Van Hensbergen of IBM is looking for interns to hack on Glenda-related projects:

A 6 month position working on Plan 9 stuff for a DOE project (http://www.research.ibm.com/hare).

The period would be some time between Sept of this year and August of next.

Requirements: A strong background in C programming, ideally with Plan 9 and/or Inferno experience. Graduate students or post graduates are preferred.

Interested parties need to send their resume and availability before June 2, 2009, and will need to be interviewed by phone by the end of next week.

There will be a second position for for a separate (but somewhat related) 3 month project in the future, more info will be posted when available, it will probably be during the summer of 2010.

You can send your resumes and recommendation letters to ericvh(a)gmail(.)com

9P implementation news roundup (2009/05/23)

Various new and updated 9P implementations have surfaced lately:

J9P/StyxLib is a Java implementation by Bernd R. Fix that includes both Plan 9 and Inferno auth support.

Ever prolific Kris Maglione has released a new client Python implementation, that for now is part of the wmii tree.

And finally Duat 6, a C client/server implementation is out.

Happy Easter Bunny Day! (2009/04/15)

(Thanks Harka Gyozo for the image!)

Plan 9 in GSoC - get your apps in now! (2009/04/01)

Plan 9 has been accepted this year as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. The Plan 9 group accepts projects related to Plan 9 and related technologies such as Inferno, Plan 9 from User Space, v9fs, 9vx, and Glendix.

If you're a student and you like any of these technologies you should apply immediately to GSoC with your project proposal(s). Time is running out: the deadline for student applications is April 3, 19:00 UTC. Comments will be possible after that point, but the application may not be edited after that date.

We're happy to entertain any ideas related to these technologies, and we've got a page of suggestions for you to consider. Write up a proposal for one of them

On the off chance (hah!) that Plan 9 doesn't have what you're looking for this summer, check out the list of other organizations participating. GSoC is a really great program, but you've got to move fast if you're interested. Get moving!

New XCPU stable release, Live CD, logo and website. (2009/03/06)

Update: XCPU 1.2.3 has been released on 2009/03/11. Tarballs, rpms and other packages are avilable at sf.net.

Another bit of new old news: XCPU 1.2.2 is the new stable XCPU release.

The XCPU folks have also put together a Fedora-based LiveCD so you can easily demo and play around with XCPU in your basement's clusters: XCPU LiveCD 1.0.

And finally XCPU has got a new website at SourceForge and a new beautiful logo with Glenda and Tux hanging from a tree:

Plan 9 Doomed (2009/03/04)

Glenda landed on Phobos starting its quest to rid the Solar System of evil (and GNU) that will eventually take it to the bottom pits of Inferno.

To help Glenda in its fight against the demonic tuxes, James Tomaschke has ported Doom to Plan 9.

While implementing the audio support, he discovered a demoniacal crashing bug in the AC97 driver, and mercilessly squashed it.

Good job James!

Edit: The latest source code can be found in a Mercurial repository here.

Grab bag of goodies (2009/02/25)

Here are some recent interesting contributions:

Mathieu Lonjaret(aka lejatorn in irc) has completed a new port of Ogg/Vorbis, libogg and libvorbis in particular and the 'sample' encoder and decoder included with the libraries. The source can be found at: /n/sources/contrib/anothy/ufo/

John Floren has posted some scripts used for the generation of the plots in the devtrace paper that should help with the processing of devtrace output. You can get them at: /n/sources/contrib/john/devtrace-scripts.tgz

Alex Efros (aka powerman in irc) built an initial Inferno package for Gentoo Linux. The package is built from the latest Inferno source tip plus a couple of extra patches; and for now can be found as part of his overlay. He is also looking for feedback before pushing the package to the more official 'sunrise overlay', you can contact him at powerman@powerman.name or find him in the #inferno freenode irc channel.

Running native code on Inferno using Vx32 (2009/02/16)

Caerwyn is back at the lab with his new creation: vxinferno, a new Inferno builtin module around Vx32 which allows inferno to run native code in a sandbox, while providing it access to the Inferno namespace.

The potential for this seems great, will allow access to existing C implementations of useful components (eg., compression and multimedia decoding libraries) without sacrificing Inferno's wonderful security and portability (well, as long as you are on x86, and we all know *the world is an x86 ;)

• inferno programmer's notebook post describing the work.
• The source code at the Google Code repo.

Inferno on the Nokia N770 and N810 (2009/02/13)

This is almost a year old news, but as part of the inferno-bin project a prebuilt emu is available for the N770.

It includes graphics and probably will also run on the N800 and N810.

Robert Raschke reports that building Inferno from source on the N810 is not too hard either.

New site engine and features! (2009/02/12)

NineTimes has been upgraded to the latest werc version!

Among other improvements this allows for user accounts and comments, for now this are only available upon request until it is certain that spam and other issues wont be a problem, to get an account just send your desired user/password combination by email, irc or pigeon carrier.

With the new engine behind 9times up and running, we will start to try to catch up with all the backlog of news.

Peace.

Update: Changed style to be more rio-like, improved css styles are welcome!

New driver for usb ethernet devices (2008/12/24)

Cinap Lenrek has written an USB CDC ECM(ie., USB Ethernet devices) driver for Plan 9.

The code can be found in sources at:

/n/sources/contrib/cinap_lenrek/usbether/

Thanks Cinap!

Binding libixp perls (2008/12/23)

Patrice (GomoR) Auffret has announced (in French!) a set of Perl bindings for the libixp 9P library.

The Lib-IXP package can be found in the cpan repository.

devtrace released (2008/12/18)

John Floren has announced the release of devtrace.

The source with installation instructions and man pages can be found in:

/n/sources/contrib/john/devtrace-backport.tgz

Credit for the idea and initial implementation goes to Ron and Aki; John finished it up and backported it from the amd64 kernel.

The paper describing the design and implementation of devtrace can be found along the other IWP9 2008 papers.

Many p9p and 9vx updates (2008/12/16)

Russ has come back from his google-induced hibernation and dropped two big packages full of updates just in time for Christmas.

The biggest improvement to 9vx is the introduction of x86-64 support, and for p9p (aka plan9port and Plan 9 from User Space) is the addition of a port of Plan 9's awk(1) courtesy of Jeff Sickel. Thanks Jeff!

Electroquongton DS (2008/12/10)

Caerwyn has released Inferno Lab nr 89, consisting of a series of applications designed for the Inferno DS using the mux window manager.

It includes multiple small games and experiments, but the most interesting and useful is a QUONG/hexinput style virtual keyboard application.

To experiment with this new input method he extracted libframe from the Inferno acme, which could be used to build an inferno '9term'.

A proposal for a next gen srv (2008/12/08)

Eric Van Hensbergen over at Grave Robbers From Outer Space (aka. IBM Research), has started working on srv²: a proposal for a next generation service registry to replace the venerable srv(3) device (aka #s and /srv).

Part of the idea is to bring srv to user space and make it more dynamic; motivated by requirements for the Blue Gene/FastOS work it would support propagation and discovery of services in neighboring nodes, perhaps taking advantage of an improved ndb that uses zerconf or inferno's virgild.

Ericvh has many other ideas, see his blog post on the subject for further details.

Glendix at FOSS India (2008/11/26)

Anant and Shantanu will be speaking about Glendix at FOSS.IN O8, India's largest Free and Open Source conference, during the day dedicated to Linux kernel hacking.

They plan to also host a 'Workout' (which seems to be a kind of Hackathon/Workshop), for details see the Glendix FOSS.IN 2008 Workout page.

Rendezvous with Zeroconf (2008/11/23)

Bonjour multicast DNS!

Eric Van Hensbergen of IBM research has added Multicast DNS client capabilities to Inferno, he describes the project in a new inferno-lab post.

The source can be found in the lab90/ directory of the inferno-lab google-code repository.

xget (2008/11/23)

From the xcpu folks at LANL and Sandia comes a new toy to help you manage the cluster in your basement.

xget is a scalable file-transfer agent designed to efficiently transfer files across thousands of cluster nodes using 'ad-hoc trees' of 9P connections.

For more info see a draft of Ron Minnich's paper, Coyote: all IB, all the time.

New Plan 9 programming intro (2008/11/22)

Pietro Gagliardi has written a basic introduction to C programming in Plan 9, while not extensive, it should help programmers comming from other environments get up to speed with some fundamental concepts and tools.

It includes sections covering: compilation, linking, Unicode/UTF-8 strings, buffered I/O, process management and notes.

A PDF version can be found in sources at: /n/sources/contrib/pietro/programming.pdf And an html version can be found in the cat-v.org doc archive.

Scheming with Glenda (2008/11/21)

Fernan Boland has ported to Plan 9 vscm, an R4RS bytecode scheme implementation. He also updated fgb's umb-scheme port to support sparse matrix.

Both packages can be found in his contrib directory: /n/sources/contrib/fernan/