IWP9 2008 Day one summary

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 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 benefits of network transparency and file system oriented interfaces to other operating systems and environments. This is done by implementing 9P file servers that wrap existing applications or resources on non-plan9 systems, for example a printer device on windows, or a word processor in OS X; this provides remote access to native applications from any other system. To make clients easier to set up, a webdav-to-9P gateway is also provided, so for example Windows clients can speak out of the box with OS X ‘upperware’.

After a lunch break we reconvened for a tutorial by Francisco J. Ballesteros on how to setup and use the Octopus. He guided us through the process of installing a server ‘PC’ on top of Plan 9, and configuring Octopus terminals on OS X and Plan 9.

We ended the ‘official’ conference day with a BoF that got started with talk about the amd64 kernel, and drifted into the development/testing process and finished with discussion of laptop hardware support and virtualization.

Finally the participants spent the evening exploring the bars and cafes of the town in small groups, some not going to sleep until late in the evening.

[Note: Coverage of certain BoF discussions has been repressed due to this humble chronicler’s extreme bias, will be glad to include more complete coverage if somebody else wants to write about of what was talked relating to releases, development process and testing.]

A summary of Day two will follow a similar release schedule, unless somebody with better memory than me writes it first…

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