NineTimes

Scheming with Glenda

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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/

Plan 9 booting on Blue Gene P

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ron Minnich from Sandia National Labs announced in 9fans that they
have Plan 9 booting on a 1024+16 node Blue Gene/P.

They aim to reach 65536 nodes, and then enable all the cores in each
node for a grand total of 262144 CPUs!

Cpu temperature info

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(Slowly catching up with this month's news...)

The ever prolific Erik Quanstrom has added a new file to devarch to
expose the CPU(s)'s temperature(s).

You will need /n/sources/contrib/quanstro/src/9/pc/^(cpuid0.s dat.h
devarch.c io.h) and then add cpuid0.s to l.s; after that
your can access the info via /dev/cputemp

IWP9 2008 Day one summary

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

*Duly following our 9-schedule, here is a summary of the first
workshop day in
Volos.  Special thanks to sqweek for correcting and improving my first
draft;
further corrections and expansions are of course very welcome.*

Today is the first day of [IWP9 2008](http://iwp9.cat-v.org/2008/) in
Volos.
Attendance was better than expected, with approximately thirty people
around
starting time.

After a brief introduction of all participants, the first talk was
presented by
Anant Narayanan who gave an excellent introduction to his Glendix
project which
aims to bring Plan 9 syscalls to the Linux kernel.

The second presentation of the morning was by Salva Peiro about the
Inferno DS
port.  It was a bit slow, but had some interesting news, such as it
seems the
Inferno DS port will need little extra work to run on Nintendo's new
DSi.

After a coffee break it was Brucee and his Tiger's turn to speak about
their awesome FPGA synthesizer and how they managed to make it speak
9P with
the handful of gates they had left over.

Next Gorka Guardiola introduced 'Upperware', which is a way to bring
the...

Back from IWP9 2008

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We are back from our Homeric travels to [this year's
IWP9](http://iwp9.cat-v.org/2008/), and will start to slowly catch up
with other news and some coverage of the conference itself, stay
tuned.

Also, if you have photos or other material from IWP9, please send them
to uriel99@gmail.com.

New nupas

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Erik Quanstrom continues his work on the 'next-gen' upas MTA, *nupas*,
and has pushed a set of updates to the usual location at
/n/sources/contrib/quanstro/src/nupas.

Changes include hardening of upas/fs and the delivery system, man
pages for mdir and splitmbox (plus the splitmbox script), imap4d has
also made progress and seems to be able to make Apple Mail and
Firebird happy, and outlook and opera seem to work too.

The full announcement Erik sent to 9fans follows:

> i pushed a new version of nupas out to
/n/sources/contrib/quanstro/src/nupas.
> the upas/fs and delivery system have been significantly hardened
since last
> time i mentioned it.
>
> i pushed man pages for mdir and splitmbox (as well as the splitmbox
script)
> to the bits directory.  nupas still installs itself to
/$objtype/bin/nupas so
> you will need to modify mknupas to install it as the default mail
system.
>
> imap4d has come around quite nicely and seems to be largely agreeing
with
> apple mail and fire...

Ask ken

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Guess who is participating in 'Ask a Google engineer'?  [Ken Thompson,
father of Unix and Plan
9](http://moderator.appspot.com/#e%3Dagltb2RlcmF0b3JyDQsSBlNlcmllcxjJAQw%2Bt%3Dagltb2RlcmF0b3JyCwsSBVRvcGljGC0M%2Bv%3D15).
(You will need a fully-enabled Web 2.0 browser to even load that page,
haha!)

Now it is your opportunity to ask Ken which is his favorite fighter
jet plane or what did he feed [Glenda](http://glenda.cat-v.org); but
be warned that the obvious questions, like "*Whats the use of Rails
framework, if we can't compensate the faster development in Rails by
hardware cost ?*" have already been asked, so hurry before somebody
aks how to best take advantage of Java's great innovations like
Garbage Collection!

Best answer so far:
> Q: *You once said : "The X server has to be the biggest program I've
ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.".  Could you elaborate ?
Do you imply that graphical servers allowed non-professionals to deal
with computers and that it turned harmful ?*
>
> A: *I was caught saying this when I first subjected my infant C
compiler to the X source.  I was trying to debug my compiler by pawing
through endless layers of conversion, reformating, copying, etc.  I
couldn't find any c...

Plan 9 system call howto

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

John Floren at the Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore has
written [a short paper explaining the process of adding a new system
call to Plan
9](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/misc/adding_a_syscall_to_plan_9/).

new m9u release

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Sqweek has released version 0.5 of the [m9u music
server](http://sqweek.dnsdojo.org/code/m9u/).

M9u is a music daemon for Unix systems with a
[9p](http://9p.cat-v.org) file system interface for playlist
management and controlling playback.

Plan 9 Authentication in Linux

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ashwin Ganti has continued the great work he started as unofficial
participant at [the 2007 Google Summer of
Code](http://gsoc.cat-v.org), and recently he published an excellent
[paper describing his efforts to bring the Plan 9 cap device and auth
model to
Linux](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/misc/plan_9_authentication_in_linux/).

See [the project homepage](http://code.google.com/p/p9authlinux/) to
get the source code.

We also have learned that Ashwin Ganti has joined the ever growing
gang of 9fans that have infiltrated the Google ranks, congratulations
Ashwin!

The Trace Device lost on its way to Greece

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In an unplanned preview of IWP9, Ron Minnich has released a paper on a
new
kernel trace device for Plan 9; unfortunately he and his coauthors
John Floren
and Aki Nyrhinen could not attend IWP9 this year so they decided to
post their
paper early.

The source code for the modified 8l linker can be found in
/n/sources/contrib/rminnich/tracepaper/, and the trace device itself
should be released shortly.  You can download the full paper in PDF
format at the [newly opened 2008 section of the IWP9 papers
archive](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/IWP9/2008/).  And here is the
Abstract to open your appetite:


> Abstract

> We describe a Plan 9 trace device, devtrace, its uses and its
implemen-
> tations.  The trace device can be used to selectively trace
functions and
> processes in Plan 9.  Users can enable a range of functions to be
traced,
> observe which of the functions are called, in what order, what their
pa-
> rameters are, and the time spent (in CPU ticks) in each function.
We
> have developed a set of tools for ...

Roundup of 9P library updates

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Various [9P](http://9p.cat-v.org)
[implementations](http://9p.cat-v.org/implementations) have seen
recent updates.

* [Libixp](http://repo.cat-v.org/libixp) continues its yearly release
schedule ;) and [sqweek has announced the release of libixp
0.5](http://repo.cat-v.org/libixp/news/) with many improvements and
usability, complicance and portability fixes.
* The recently released [Duat](http://kyuba.org/duat) portable
9P2000/9P2000.u implementation in C has been updated with some minor
fixes and improvements (and I'm told more comprehensive updates are on
its way)>
* No new versions of npfs have been released, but various updates have
been committed to the svn tree, including Infiniband RDMA transport
support by Tom Tucker.
* V9fs got some bug fixing to be included with the Linux kernel
release 2.6.27, and ericvh has posted a big refactoring and
reorganization that he hopes will be included in 2.6.28.

Registration for IWP9 opens

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The registration period for the [Third International Workshop for Plan
9 and Inferno](http://iwp9.cat-v.org/2008/) has opened.

To register send an e-mail with your name, affiliation and email
address (in
one line each) to iwp9@inf.uth.gr and Cc iwplan9@gmail.com;
registration is
free and includes entry to the talks and panels.

The registration deadline *has changed* and is now Oct 5th 2008, so
hurry up!

Inferno ported to the OpenMoko

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Masha Rabinovich has got hosted Inferno to run on the OpenMoko
cellphone
platform.  There is a [google code inferno-openmoko
project](http://code.google.com/p/inferno-openmoko/) with the source
code for the port.

So far the port even has the JIT working!

Duat A new 9P library in C

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Jyujin, from the Kyuba project, has released [a new 9P implementation
in C called duat](http://kyuba.org/node/4) under a BSD license.

It includes both client and server implementations and has support for
the .u extension.

Duat has been added to the [list of existing 9P
implementations](http://9p.cat-v.org/implementations).

Inferno-ds updates

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There has been lots of progress in the [inferno-ds
project](http://code.google.com/p/inferno-ds/) to port Inferno to the
Nintendo DS.

Support for both screens, audio playback and recording, and sd storage
(for some adaptors) are all working now, and the wifi code just needs
some more testing and fixing.

Salva Peiró has [written a paper describing the project, including
technical details and plans for the
future](http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/ports/inferno_ds).

He has also called for contributors that are interested in improving
and expanding the current code and experimenting with possible apps
for the system.

Glendix status update

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Glendix implements the Plan 9 syscalls in the Linux kernel to allow
running
unmodified Plan 9 binaries on Linux (a sort of kernel-level reverse
linuxemu).

Some weeks ago [Anant posted a status
update](http://glendix.org/news/2008/sources/) in the [official
Glendix web site](http://glendix.org/) announcing that 13 syscalls had
been implemented, enough
to run cat(1), sed(1), 8c(1), grep(1) and others.

Extended deadline for IWP9 paper submission

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Spyros Lalis has posted to 9fans to announce that the deadline for
submitting
papers to the [third](http://iwp9.cat-v.org/2008/) [International
Workshops for Plan 9 and Inferno](http://iwp9.cat-v.org)
has been extended to Monday September the eighth.

If your paper is still in progress and you need some extra time, you
can
contact Program Committee chair, Richard Miller, miller at hamnavoe
dot com.

New rc shell feature

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Based on an original idea and initial code by Erik Quanstrom, Russ Cox
has
implemented a new feature in [the rc
shell](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc) to allow
subscripts
that select a sequence (ie., range) of items.

The extended syntax for subscript notation is like this:

	; foo = (a b c d)
	; echo $foo(2-3)
	b c
	echo $foo(2-)
	b c d

Russ points out in the patch(1) he submitted to sources that this
allows to
replace the old idiom:

	; *=($x); shift; x=($*)

with the much cleaner:

	; x=$x(2-)

This change was committed a few weeks ago to both the main (native)
Plan 9 tree
and the [Plan 9 from User Space](http://plan9.us) tree.

Sources downtime

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Geoff Collyer posted a note in 9fans saying that
sources.cs.bell-labs.com venti arenas partition has run out of space
and will be down for a couple of days until more disk space can be
added.  He plans to fix this on Wednesday and things should be back to
normal by Thursday.

**Update**: Sources has been back up and running for almost a day on
new hardware and using a much bigger venti.  Thanks Geoff!

New 9mount release

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Sqweek
[announced](http://groups.google.com/group/9p-hackers/msg/296e6a15d83ea8ef)
in [the 9p-hackers
mailinglist](http://groups.google.com/group/9p-hackers/) the release
of version 1.3 of his [9mount](http://sqweek.dnsdojo.org/code/9mount/)
helper utilities to mount (unmount and bind) [9P](http://9p.cat-v.org)
file systems in Linux systems with [v9fs](http://v9fs.sf.net).

Changes in this release include support for most v9fs options,
including virtio and fd transports, setting of msize and exclusive
attach/access mode.

9umount can now unmount non-9p filesystems (if they were mounted in
your home directory), which should make 9bind more usable.

Also the license has been set to the very simple and clean
MIT/BSD-like ISC license.

Links:

* Home page: 
* Manual page: 
* Download:

IWP9 08 CFP reminder and other conference news

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Miller [posted to 9fans](http://9fans.net/archive/2008/07/384)
and Inferno list reminding of the end of August deadline to submit
papers for [the Third International Workshop for Plan 9 and
Inferno](http://iwp9.cat-v.org/2008/).

In other conference news, [Eric Van
Hensbergen](http://graverobbers.blogspot.com) of IBM research gave a
talk about using [9P](http://9p.cat-v.org) in paravirtualized
environments during the *KVM Forum 2008*, [you can read a pdf with the
slides from his
presentation](http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/KvmForum2008?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=kdf2008_16.pdf).

And finally Ron Minnich of Sandia National Labs will be at Argonne
National Laboratory speaking the 13th of August about Plan 9 in the
BlueGene as part of the [Blue Gene Consortium Open Source
Workshop](https://www.alcf.anl.gov/events/workshops/bgconsort_os/).

New lguest release

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

To keep up with the vx9 competition ;) Ron Minnich has updated lguest
to work with the latest Plan 9 and Linux kernels, it can be found on
[/n/sources/contrib/rminnich/lguest/](http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/rminnich/lguest/),
9lguestcpu.elf is the ready to run binary and lguest.tgz has all the
source.

Send any comments and improvements to ron at: rminnich-gmail.com

P9p native UI for OS X

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Among many other improvements, the latest [Plan 9 from User Space (aka
plan9port)](http://plan9.us) has support for native OS X graphics so
you don't need to install X11 anymore.

All you need to do is do an hg pull (and update) and re-run the
./INSTALL script.  If for some reason you want to use X11 graphics
(for example if you want to do ssh/X forwarding) create the file
$PLAN9/LOCAL.config with the contents:

	WSYSTYPE=x11

And rebuild your p9p tree.

As usual, all credit goes to the tireless Russ Cox.

New 9vx version

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Fast as the heels of the first public release comes version 0.11 with
a bunch of bug fixes and some extra features.

On MacOS X it includes experimental native GUI support and fixes the
cpu-hogging bug.

To download the the binary distribution go to [the 9vx
home](http://swtch.com/9vx/) and to [the vx32
home](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/) for the source code.

Announcing 9vx

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Russ Cox [announced](http://9fans.net/archive/2008/06/403) in 9fans
[9vx](http://swtch.com/9vx/), a port of the Plan 9 kernel to run as a
user space process on *nix systems (including OS X, and a win32 port
is apparently feasible) using the
[vx32](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/) sandboxing framework he
developed with Bryan Ford at MIT.

It can execute unmodified Plan 9 i386 binaries, and includes all the
standard file servers like networking, graphics and audio.

It is still experimental, and people have reported some issues with
the OS X version, but seems to work fairly well under Linux.

For more information see:

* [http://swtch.com/9vx/](http://swtch.com/9vx/) - 9vx homepage
*
[http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/)
- vx32 homepage
* [Vx32: Lightweight User-level Sandboxing on the
x86](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/vx32:usenix08-abs.html) - Paper
presented at Usenix 2008 about vx32 and 9vx.

*Update:* Andrey Mirtchovski reports that using the -F flag so 9vx
doesn't fork into the backg...

Venti servers survey

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Russ Cox has posted to 9fans asking for people who run venti servers
to send him some stats to survey for usage patterns.

If you want to contribute all you have to do is run the following
commands:


       hget http://localhost:8000/storage >/tmp/vstats
       hget http://localhost:8000/index >>/tmp/vstats

       mail -s 'venti survey' rsc@swtch.com

Inferno DS gets a x6 perf boost

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Salva Peiró continues his amazing work on Inferno port to the Nintendo
DS and has
[announced](http://groups.google.com/group/inferno-ds/browse_thread/thread/9756d2b275419a90)
in [the inferno-ds google
group](http://groups.google.com/group/inferno-ds) that after enabling
the MPU (ARM CP15 Protection Unit) and caches, he measured a six fold
performance improvement.

His perception is "that it's similar in speed [to] launching emu on a
standard pc (2 or 3 years old)."

And this is all without JIT, which gives extra margin for improvement
in case it is ever needed.

He finishes mentioning "*I was worried about the performance
one could achieve running Inferno on the DS, needless to say now all
my worries about that have disappeared.*"

Shortly afterwards [he posted a reply to his
announcement](http://groups.google.com/group/inf...

New releases of acme-sac for OSX

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Eric Nichols (aka underspecified) has released acme-sac 0.30 and
[0.31](http://groups.google.com/group/acme-sac/browse_thread/thread/c38e6d95f78d85cd)
for Mac
OS X. It fixes a bug in 0.29 where double characters were added to the
buffer
for every keystroke and 0.31 finally resolves crashes on older
versions of Mac OS X (before Leopard).

Other changes included:

* Esc key now selects and deletes previously entered text
* SVN revision and build date now included in /dev/sysctl

He also clarifies that *support for pre-10.4 machines has not been
discontinued.  Requirements are as follows*:

* Native Carbon version: OS X 10.4 and later
* X11 version: verified back as far OS X 10.3

Download:
[AcmeSAC-0.31.dmg](http://acme-sac.googlecode.com/files/AcmeSAC-0.31.dmg)

Dis on a Chip Update

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

[Bruce Ellis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Ellis) has been busy
but managed to put some more of his magic into Dis on a Chip and he
[posted an update about what has been going on
lately](http://groups.google.com/group/dis-on-a-chip/browse_thread/thread/3cf9d5ecb5c4301b)__*__.

He has been playing with small designs to do specialized high
performance
busses.

And he mentions that Xilinx Web Ise 10.1 is now available for free.
"*It saves me code and thought as it infers dual port rams now.*"

He also would like to hear from people with opencores experience.

___*___ Note: The post was to the [Dis on a Chip Google
Group](http://groups.google.com/group/dis-on-a-chip), which is not
public but anyone can apply for membership and as the group
description mentions: "*Please don't hesitate to tell your esteemed
friends about this group.  Nobody has been denied admission (yet).  It
is restricted to stop noise.*"

Chicken Scheme 9p

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Bex (aka Sjaaman) has released his finished implementation of
[9P2000](http://9p.cat-v.org) in Chicken Scheme.  A corresponding new
entry has been added to [the list of 9P
implementations](http://9p.cat-v.org/implementations).

* Download:
[9p.egg](http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/eggs/9p.egg).
* Documentation:
[http://chicken.wiki.br/9p](http://chicken.wiki.br/9p).

Thanks Sqweek for letting us know.

New acme-sac for Mac OS X release

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Underspecified has released version 0.29 of
[acme-sac](http://acme-sac.googlecode.com) for Mac OS X. Changes
include:

* Added a proper quit apple event handler to prevent Acme SAC from not
responding to quit requests from logout and the task switcher.
* Updated version.h and Acme SAC's "Get Info" version string to
include the SVN revision number as per suggestions by Caerwyn and Axel
Belinfante.

[AcmeSAC-0.29.dmg](http://acme-sac.googlecode.com/files/AcmeSAC-0.29.dmg)

Launching

uriel@noreply.cat-v.org (uriel) — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

NineTimes will be a site for all news and stories about Plan 9,
Inferno, 9P, and any related technologies.

We are slowly getting started, but [news items and ideas are
welcome](mailto:uriel99@gmail.com).

Some things that might be nice but are not implemented are:
categories/tags and comments.  (Anyone interested in implementing this
feel free to submit patches for werc ;))

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