[TUHS] Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

Douglas McIlroy douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu
Thu Feb 2 09:31:41 AEST 2023


> 9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)

Thanks to all who set me straight. Sometimes being corrected is good news.

Doug

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:47 PM ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The u-root cpu command uses 9p, and Eric Van Hensbergen recently submitted changes to Linux kernel 9p that boost throughput 10x. We continue to look at ways to make it faster.
>
> 9p lives on in several corners of the world :-)
>
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 12:43 PM A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
>> have met the same fate.
>>
>> Not at all. :-) Windows Subsystem for Linux uses 9P to share files
>> between the linux and windows environments on the same box:
>>
>> $ ps -ef
>> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
>> root         1     0  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:00 /init
>> root         4     1  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:02 plan9 --control-socket
>> 5 --log-level 4 --server-fd 6 --pipe-fd 8 --log-truncate
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
>> <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>> >
>> > > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes
>> >
>> > I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
>> > System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
>> > story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
>> >
>> > > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>> >
>> > So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
>> > be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
>> > complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
>> > had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
>> > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
>> > have met the same fate.
>> >
>> > Doug


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