Announcing 9vx ( Last mod: Jun 27 15:56 )
Russ Cox announced in 9fans 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 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/ - 9vx homepage
- http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/vm/ - vx32 homepage
- Vx32: Lightweight User-level Sandboxing on the x86 - 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 background solves the issues with OS X (a proper fix will come soon).