Anant Narayanan

UNIX++: Plan 9 From Bell Labs

UNIX is no doubt the most distinguished hallmark of Operating Systems design. However, one must also admit that it is quite old, the seeds of UNIX were sown way back in 1969. The most popular free operating system: GNU/Linux is almost entirely based on the very same concepts, and deviates very little (if at all) from the original UNIX.

A lot has changed since UNIX was first conceived, but surprisingly, research in the systems programming area has almost come to a complete halt and everybody seems to be happy with UNIX

Plan 9 From Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs, whose original designers were the same set as those of UNIX itself. The primary purpose of Plan 9 is to overcome the shortcomings of UNIX and design an operating system that takes advantage of modern technology - most notably - computer networks, from ground up.

This talk will introduce to the audience what Plan 9 is all about, and how it differs from traditional UNIX systems. We'll take a look a look at the most interesting features and see what kind of applications can be built using them. Plan 9 from Bell Labs is an open source project, and we'll also take a look at how community dynamics work in such a research project. Finally, we'll conclude with a few thoughts on what you can do to contribute to the project and help Plan 9 migrate into the mainstream FOSS community.

-- AndrewLynn - 02 Nov 2007