Operating systems
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Operating systems edit (Category edit)
Contents |
[edit] Plan 9
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/about.html.
[edit] Introduction
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present.
Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign.
In Plan 9, each process has its own mutable name space. A process may rearrange, add to, and remove from its own name space without affecting the name spaces of unrelated processes. Included in the name space mutations is the ability to mount a connection to a file server speaking 9P, a simple file protocol. The connection may be a network connection, a pipe, or any other file descriptor open for reading and writing with a 9P server on the other end. Customized name spaces are used heavily throughout the system, to present new resources (e.g., the window system), to import resources from another machine (e.g., the network stack), or to browse backward in time (e.g., the dump file system).
Plan 9 is an operating system kernel but also a collection of accompanying software. The bulk of the software is predominantly new, written for Plan 9 rather than ported from Unix or other systems. The window system, compilers, file server, and network services are all freshly written for Plan 9. Although classic Unix programs like dc(1), ed(1), and even troff(1) have been brought along, they are often in an updated form. For example, troff accepts Unicode documents encoded in UTF-8, as does the rest of the system.
The paper Plan 9 from Bell Labs gives a more in-depth introduction to the system.
[edit] Current Status
Slowly, ideas from Plan 9 are being adopted by other systems. Plan 9 was the first operating system with complete support for the UTF-8 Unicode character set encoding. The dump file system has been mimicked in Athena’s OldFiles directories or Network Appliance’s .snapshot directories. The flexible rfork(2) system call, the basis of lightweight threads, was adopted as is by the various BSD derivatives and reincarnated on Linux as clone(2). The simple file protocol 9P has been implemented on early versions of FreeBSD and current versions of Linux.
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Because Plan 9 has a very different system model from other modern operating systems, it is sometimes difficult to port external software to Plan 9. In particular, Plan 9 has no full-featured web browser; webfs(4) and html(2) are intended as steps toward a solution.
[edit] Haiku
http://haiku-os.org/about/faq. [Linux (category)]
[edit] Is Haiku based on Linux?
Haiku is not a Linux distribution. To achieve our goals for Haiku, we decided not to use the Linux kernel, nor to rely on the X Window System or toolkits such as GTK+ or Qt. Instead, Haiku is a self-contained operating system that includes a graphical user interface tightly tied to a unique graphics system, all configuration applications, development tools, the GNU tool chain, and a bash terminal.
[edit] Why not Linux?
Linux-based distributions are a collection of numerous software that do not necessarily follow the same development guidelines and/or goals. This lack of overall vision often results in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and sometimes inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be.
Instead, Haiku aims to be developed under a single unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, will enable us to provide a better user experience that is simple and uniform throughout.
