News

(This page is not updated with trivia, for other news about Plan 9, Inferno and related technologies see NineTimes)

SSH REVERSION

Bare `ssh' is now ssh1. ssh2 is still available as `ssh2'.

- 11 February 2014


RENUMBERING OUTSIDE MACHINES

We're about to change the IPv4 addresses of our outside machines (from 204.178.31.x to 135.104.24.y). There may be outages, we'll try to keep them brief.

IPv6 addresses will follow.

- 19 November 2013


NEW PORT: ROUTERBOARD RB450G (MIPS32)

/sys/src/9/rb contains a port to the Mikrotik Routerboard RB450G.

- 24 July 2013


NEW PORT: RASPBERRY PI

/sys/src/9/bcm contains Richard Miller's port to the Raspberry Pi model B. See words in that directory.

- 25 Jan 2013


NEW PC BOOTSTRAPS

9pxeload and 9load have replacements built from kernel source. They should appear over the next few days.

- 10 May 2012


NEW ARM PORT: TRIMSLICE

/sys/src/9/teg2 contains a port to the multi-core v7-architecture Compulab Trimslice. See _announce in that directory.

- 1 May 2012


PC ACPI SUPPORT

The kernel source on sources now contains minimal ACPI support in the pc port. It's just enough to enable cores not described in the MP table, but assumes the basic sanity of the MP table's interrupt routing entries. Only the pccpu configuration includes it by default.

This is no help to systems that have no MP table at all, such as those built from Intel's ``legacy-free'' motherboards, alas.

- 11 October 2011


PLAN 9 APPLYING TO GOOGLE SUMMER OF CODE

Plan 9 is again applying to participate in GSoC. Our application is in and we're now awaiting the decision of the fine folks at Google, on March 18th.

- March 11, 2011


SIXTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON PLAN 9

IWP9 2011 will be held October 20—21 in Madrid, Spain, hosted by Francisco Ballesteros of Rey Juan Carlos University.


FIFTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON PLAN 9

IWP9 2010 will be held October 11—13 in Seattle, WA, USA, sponsored by the US Dept. of Energy.


ARM PORTS

A CPU server port for the Sheevaplug and Openrd-client has been available in /sys/src/9/kw for a few months. USB support is now working, as of today, in part due to the efforts of Professor Francisco Ballesteros.

A new port for the IGEPv2 board is available, starting today, and Rae McLellan of Bell Labs deserves thanks for helping to decrypt what passes for hardware documentation these days. This port is being made available now primarily as a basis for GSoC students; we hope it will improve. USB is not yet working.

- 23 April 2010


ABACO

The lightweight web browser abaco is now distributed as part of the stock Plan 9 distribution.

- July 30, 2009


NEW USB STACK

Thanks to a mountain of hard work done by Professor Francisco Ballesteros of Rey Juan Carlos University, we now have a greatly-modernized USB stack, including support for EHCI (USB 2.0) and improved support for USB mice, keyboards, and storage devices during booting. Thanks are due to Nemo for doing the work and to Geoff for integrating it into the distribution.

- May 26, 2009


FOURTH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON PLAN 9

IWP9 2009 will be held October 21—23 in Athens, Georgia, USA, hosted by Coraid.

The home page is here.


SOURCES BROWSING REINSTATED

After a hiatus of about two months, sources browsing via HTTP has been provisionally re-enabled. If it is overused and bogs down our web server, it will go away again.


THIRD INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON PLAN 9

From: spyros lalis <lalis@inf...>;
Subject: [9fans] next iwp9
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:07:28 +0200

Dear 9fans,

With the initiative of Francisco Ballesteros and
Sape Mullender, a time and a place have been set
for the next International Workshop on Plan 9.

IWP9 will be held on October 30 and 31 in Volos, Greece.
(located by the sea, between Athens and Thessaloniki)

The home page is here.


VENTI UPGRADE

The newer version of venti (our block store) previously known as nventi has been promoted to be the standard venti. The distribution and sources are now up to date.


SECOND INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON PLAN 9

On the 20th anniversary of Plan 9's creation:

Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2007 10:15:28 -0400
From: Sape Mullender <sape@huygens.org>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] 2nd International Workshop on Plan 9
We have started preparations to host the Second very International
Workshop on Plan 9 at Bell Labs MH in December of this year, almost
certainly Monday December 3 and Tuesday December 4.

The call for papers is here.

For directions to Bell Labs MH, see here.


PLAN 9 AT THE GOOGLE SUMMER OF CODE 2007

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is participating in the Google Summer of Code, see gsoc.cat-v.org for more information.


KERNEL CHANGES AND VESA SUPPORT

VESA video support has been added to the default distribution and the kernel has new PC MMU code that has a cleaner separation of virtual and physical addresses, which should address the various mmukmap2 panics that people have reported over the years.

To boot one of these new kernels you will need to copy the new /386/9load to your 9fat or floppy disk so that it can cope with the new kernel load address. (It will still handle the old ones too.)

The pc kernels use the BIOS E820 memory map when available rather than poking at each megabyte until they decide there's no more. If you have a system where this causes problems, you can put "*noe820scan=" in plan9.ini, and then please LET US KNOW so we can try to fix them.

There is also a new driver sdmv50xx for the Marvell 88SX5040 family of SATA cards. Thank you to Coraid.

If you see any problems mail 9fans (mailing lists) or submit patches (how to contribute).

uriel - Thu Dec 15 2005 - from posts by rsc's to 9fans: original announcement, update.


PLAN 9 LIVES ON

Peter Salus, and later Slashdot, broke the news that Dept. 1127, the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs and the birthplace of Unix and Plan 9, has been broken up by Bell Labs management. The various members will be reabsorbed into two or three other departments in the latest internal reorganization.

Sape Mullender wrote to 9fans to reassure that Plan 9 work continues:

1127 ceased to exist some time ago.  The department was renamed and got a
much longer number which, of course, I can no longer remember.  The current
split of what's left of 1127 is not considered to be a big deal by most
members of the department.  There have always been many interdepartmental
collaborations, so 1127 has always been more of a management entity than a
group/club/fraternity.

[...]

Plan 9 is alive and reasonably well as our current vehicle for wireless 
systems research. Plan 9 has gone embedded (but rest assured, all our
wireless software runs in user space, using Plan 9's real-time scheduler to
make sure it runs when it needs to.

Using Plan 9, wireless code becomes useful in a fraction of the time that 
code can be made to run on all those commercial embedded operating systems
(which I do not care to mention) and also much quicker than on Linux which I
am sorry to say is just too large and illegible.

Releases will continue with their usual regularity.

uriel - August 19, 2005 (updated by rsc - October 12, 2005)


LIBRE SOFTWARE MEETING SLIDES

The slides form Charles Forsyth talk at Libre Software Meeting 2005 are online:

And as an extra, the paper The Ubiquitous File Server in Plan 9

uriel - August 2, 2005


NEWS NEWS

As agreed during WTH, a wiki page to collect the news from the Plan 9 community has been created, feel free to post news items at the top of this page.

uriel - August 1, 2005