On Mon, 08 Oct 2018 19:03:49 -0400 Dan Cross <cro...@gmail.com> wrote: > > plan9 is breathtakingly elegant, but this is in no small part because as a > research system it had the luxury of simply ignoring many thorny problems > that would have marred that beauty but that the developers chose not to > tackle. Some of these problems have non-trivial domain complexity and, > while "modern" systems are far too complex by far, that doesn't mean that > all solutions can be recast as elegantly simple pearls in the plan9 style.
One thing I have mused about is recasting plan9 as a microkernel and pushing out a lot of its kernel code into user mode code. It is already half way there -- it is basically a mux for 9p calls, low level device drivers, VM support & some process related code. Such a redesign can be made more secure and more resilient. The kind of problems you mention are easier to fix in user code. Different application domains may have different needs which are better handled as optional user mode components. Said another way, keep the good parts of the plan9 design and reachitect/reimplement the kernel + essential drivers/usermode daemons. This is unlikely to happen (without some serious funding) but still fun to think about! If done, this would be a more radical departure than Oberon-7 compared to Oberon but in the same spirit.
