That's what I mean though, I see the theme, but it seems to me to be about the same as trying to fit everything into an HTTP REST API, it all falls apart when something comes along that breaks the abstraction. For example if you have something that wants to pass a structure of pointers into the kernel, you can't reasonably do that with 9p, so now you've got a special case. The debug APIs can still only return a direct memory mapped pointer to the process memory as a special case, the normal case is doing copies of memory regions over the socket, no matter how large they are. If you want to add compression to your VNC thing, or add some more complex routing to your network setup, you have to start adding special daemons and proxies and translation layers into another socket, which is not really different from what you would be doing on a more traditional Unix. Or is there another way plan9 handles these?
ori_b|5 years ago
> The debug APIs can still only return a direct memory mapped pointer to the process memory as a special case
Can you point to the special case here?
http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/3/proc
Because it replaces ptrace, and seems to work perfectly fine when I mount it over 9p. It's used by acid, which needs no additional utilities: http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/acid
> If you want to add compression to your VNC thing
Images may be sent compressed. More -- or at least better -- formats would be good, but this is done.
http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/3/draw
For a full implementation of remote login using these interfaces, here's the code:
http://shithub.us/ori/plan9front/fd1db35c4d429096b9aff1763f2...
It's a bit complex because it needs to do more than just forward mouse, keyboard and drawing -- signals need to be interposed and forwarded, and there are a few other subtle things that need to happen in the namespace. And because it contains both the client and server code. Even so, it's still small compared to VNC.
And yes, shithub is hosted on plan 9.
> or add some more complex routing to your network setup, you have to start adding special daemons and proxies and translation layers into another socket
Here are the network APIs.
http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/3/ip
What kind of complex routing are you talking about, and why would it be impossible to implement using those interfaces?