Plan 9

operating system (Named after the classically bad,

exceptionally low-budget SF film "Plan 9 from Outer Space") An

operating system developed at Bell Labs by many

researchers previously intimately involved with Unix.

Plan 9 is superficially Unix-like but features far finer

control over the name-space (on a per-process basis) and is

inherently distributed and scalable.

Plan 9 is divided according to service functions. CPU servers

concentrate computing power into large multiprocessors; file

servers provide repositories for storage and terminals give

each user of the system a dedicated computer with bitmap

screen and mouse on which to run a window system. The sharing

of computing and file storage services provides a sense of

community for a group of programmers, amortises costs and

centralises and hence simplifies management and

administration.

The pieces communicate by a single protocol, built above a

reliable data transport layer offered by an appropriate

network, that defines each service as a rooted tree of files.

Even for services not usually considered as files, the unified

design permits some simplification. Each process has a local

file name space that contains attachments to all services the

process is using and thereby to the files in those services.

One of the most important jobs of a terminal is to support its

user's customised view of the entire system as represented by

the services visible in the name space.

Documentation (an FTP

server running Plan 9).