Report and Abstract for Plan9 Operating System

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An operating system is a collection of programs and procedures that help the user to work with the computer efficiently. To enable an efficient and productive use with the system of any sort, the prorating system used must be so designed such that it gives all the necessary facilities to work for the users. Many operating systems have been designed over the years for different classes of users. But most of them were designed for single user workstations. By the mid 1980's, the trend in computing was away from large centralized time-shared computers towards networks of smaller, personal machines, typically UNIX `workstations’. People had grown weary of overloaded, bureaucratic timesharing machines and were eager to move to small, self-maintained systems, even if that meant a net loss in computing power. As microcomputers became faster, even that loss was recovered, and this style of computing remains popular today.

In the rush to personal workstations, though, some of their weaknesses were overlooked. First, the operating system they run, UNIX, is itself an old timesharing system and has had trouble adapting to ideas born after it. Graphics and networking were  added to UNIX well into its lifetime and remain poorly integrated and difficult to administer. Plan 9 began in the late 1980's as an attempt to have it both ways: to build a system that was centrally administered and cost-effective using cheap modern microcomputers as its computing elements. The idea was to build a time-sharing system out of workstations, but in a novel way. Different computers would handle different tasks: small, cheap machines in people’s offices would serve as terminals providing access to large, central, shared resources such as computing servers and file servers. For the central machines, the coming wave of shared-memory multiprocessors seemed obvious candidates.

The problems with UNIX were too deep to fix, but some of its ideas could be brought along. The best was its use of the file system to coordinate naming of and access to resources, even those, such as devices, not traditionally treated as files. Plan 9 is  designed around this basic principle that all resources appear as files in a hierarchial file system, which is unique to each process. As for the design of any operating system various things such as the design of the file and directory system implementation and the various interfaces are important. Plan 9 has all these well-designed features. All these help to provide a strong base for the operating system that could be well suited in a  distributed and networked environment.

The different features of Plan 9 operating system are:
?    The dump file system makes a daily snapshot of the file store available to the
users.
?    Unicode character set supported throughout the system.
?    Advanced kernel synchronization facilities for parallel processing.
?    Security- there is no super-user or root user and the passwords are never sent over
the network.

Hardware Requirements

A large Plan 9 installation has a number of computers networked together, each providing a particular class of service. Shared multiprocessor servers provide computing cycles; other large machines offer file storage. Lower bandwidth networks such as Ethernet or ISDN connect these servers to office and home resident workstations or PC’s, called terminals in Plan 9 terminology. Figure below shows the CPU servers and file servers share fast local area networks, while terminals use slower wider –area networks such as Ethernet, Data kit, or telephone lines to connect to them. Gateway machines, which are just CPU servers connected to multiple networks, allow machines on one network to see another. The modern style of computing offers a dedicated PC or workstation. It runs on multiple hardware platforms and is highly suited to building large distributed systems. A typical Plan9 installation would comprise a file server, some CPU servers and a large number of terminals. Plan9 is suitable for small
research groups to large organizations. The low system management overhead makes it particularly suitable for classroom teaching applications.

CPU servers and file servers share fast local area networks, while terminals use slower wider –area networks such as Ethernet, Data kit, or telephone lines to connect to them. Gateway machines, which are just CPU servers connected to multiple networks, allow machines on one network to see another. The modern style of computing offers a dedicated PC or workstation. It runs on multiple hardware platforms and is highly suited to building large distributed systems. A typical Plan9 installation would comprise a file server, some CPU servers and a large number of terminals. Plan9 is suitable for small research groups to large organizations. The low system management overhead makes it particularly suitable for classroom teaching applications.

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