26-12-2009, 07:54 PM
Plan9
Plan 9 is the research successsor to Unix developed by Bell Labs as an attempt
to build a system that was centrally administered and cost-eective using cheap
modern microcomputers as its computing elements. The tagline of the project was "To build a UNIX out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little UNIXes".This included building a time-sharing system out of workstations, but in a novel way. Dierent computers would handle dierent tasks: small, cheap machines in people's oces would serve as terminals providing access to large, central, shared resources such as computing servers and file servers.
Some concepts introduced by Plan 9 are:
1)Everything is a file: Resources are named and accessed like files in a
hierarchical file systemand everything is file witout exception and You can read and write to any device or file using common functions.
2)The 9P protocol:a simple file protocol was required.9P (also know as Styx) is the standard protocol to access all resources (local or remote) on Plan 9.
3)Unicode: Plan uses UTF-8 encoding for all text in the system .UTF-8
is a unicode encoding that is backward compatible with ASCII.
4)Namespaces:every process has its own namespace, this increasing modularity, improving security and making application development easier.Disjoint hierarchies provided by dierent services are joined together into a single private hierarchical le name space in Plan 9.
5)Union directories: are directories that combine resources across different media or networks, bind-ing transparently to other directories.Unix-style links are environment variables are no longer required.
A standard Plan 9 ISO is around 250MB, which includes a window manager, text
editor, C compiler and other development tools.
Glendix
It is the combination of the words glenda and tux. Glenda the
rabbit is the mascot of the Plan 9 operating system, while Tux the penguin is the
mascot for the Linux kernel.the Plan 9 kernel is an excellent example of kernel design, it lacks in terms of device drivers.So In glendix we decouple Linux from GNU utilities, and port Plan 9 user-space applications to run on the Linux kernel. In short, we are combining the Plan 9 user-space with the Linux kernel-space - resulting in a "hybrid" operating system.
Full seminar report download:
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