> It's fast. But the big beauty of it for me is that in vx32/src/9vx/a > is pretty much a plan 9 kernel in plan 9 C vernacular. I just spent an > easy short time prototyping some new stuff that I can now drop into a > real plan 9 kernel for Blue Gene, no changes needed. The > edit/build/test boot cycle is measured in seconds. The fact that we > have a friendly path via codereview(1) and bitbucket is the icing on > the cake.
This is definitely one of my favorite things about 9vx. It's a great environment for doing kernel hacking. > [comments about instability] I don't think there's any inherent reason why 9vx must be unstable, but it certainly has a couple bugs. I haven't had the time to track them down and fix them, but I'm always happy to point in the right direction if you can reproduce one. There have been a few reports about it dying with cryptic errors from vx32. I'd like to track those down but a reproducible test case is an absolute requirement for the gritty low-level code at the bottom. The fact that 9vx works as well as it does has always made me feel like I was cheating. It feels like it should be impossible or at least much harder, and yet there it is, and most things run. Russ
