That name collision question re Nix-OS came up in 2011. I talked to some folks, they more or less said "don't worry about the name", so I decided not to.
The name NxM was intended to mean "N kernel cores, M application cores" -- i.e. to be evocative of the NIX model. We probably could have called it KxA, but ... I've looked at the nix tree at github.com/rminnich/nix-os. It had significant bit rot from 2011-2012, with some half-done experiments. I added a new branch, first_commit, at the first commit, because the state of the master branch was ... a mess. The README event referred to a file that had been removed. The changes we made from Plan 9 to NIX were not large, and I suspect porting the first_commit to 9front or other kernel would be easier. Right now it won't build, but if you look in sys/src/nix/k8 you'll find pre-built kernels that might work in qemu. The 9front vmx command won't boot them, they are valid multiboot images but vmx does not think so. This might be a bug in vmx. Why NIX? If you think about it, timesharing is designed for a world where cores are scarce. But on a machine with hundreds of cores, running Plan 9, there are < 100 processes. We can assign a core to each process, and let those processes own the core until they are done. This might be a useful simplification, it might not, but it's something. I did run some standard HPC benchmarks on NIX ACs and the results were good. I was always curious how it would work if we had those multi-hundred-core machines Intel and IBM and others were telling us about in 2011. Now that we have them, it would be interesting to try. Fun fact: when the Power-9 came in to Google, and it had more cores than bits in a 64-bit word, it caused some angst. It got worked out, but nobody had really considered that problem. Hardware events overtook us all. I believe there are similar bitmask issues in Plan 9, I guess we'll see. ron On Tue, Jan 7, 2025 at 4:03 AM Stuart Morrow <morrow.stu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > But what about the name collision with the other Nix OS? > > On Mon, 6 Jan 2025 at 03:57, Ron Minnich <rminn...@p9f.org> wrote: > > > > I think it's ok to start with NIX, not NxM. > > > > On Sun, Jan 5, 2025 at 10:45 AM Stuart Morrow <morrow.stu...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > > > > > On Sun, 5 Jan 2025 at 16:39, Ron Minnich <rminn...@p9f.org> wrote: > > > > take that 2011 code, bring it to your plan 9 system, and see if > > > > > > But https://github.com/rminnich/nxm has 410 commits after 2011? My > > > understanding was NIX and "NxM" aren't really different things, that > > > they can be understood as just a name change since their development > > > is entirely timewise-disjoint. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T7692a612f26c8ec5-Md05ec18df1fcd5ff02465148 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
