[HN Gopher] Porting Inferno OS to Raspberry Pi
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       Porting Inferno OS to Raspberry Pi
        
       Author : rcarmo
       Score  : 55 points
       Date   : 2023-09-05 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | MisterTea wrote:
       | This port is ancient history.
       | 
       | Have a look at: https://dboddie.gitlab.io/inferno-
       | diary/index.html
        
         | rcarmo wrote:
         | That's the kind of blog I wouldn't mind reading if it had an
         | RSS feed.
        
       | caerwy wrote:
       | You can also run inferno on a raspberry pi pico. I did the port
       | here https://github.com/caerwynj/inferno-os/tree/pico
        
         | soapdog wrote:
         | :-O do you have some demo of it running or a blog post about
         | it. I'd love to learn more.
        
         | sillywalk wrote:
         | Interesting. I thought Inferno needed > 1MB ram.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | packetlost wrote:
       | I wish Inferno/Plan 9 had caught on more, but sadly I think it's
       | not quite the abstraction(s) we need in the modern day.
        
         | MisterTea wrote:
         | This comment makes me sad. Plan 9 is still very much alive -
         | see 9front.org a fork that is actively maintained.
         | 
         | > but sadly I think it's not quite the abstraction(s) we need
         | in the modern day.
         | 
         | This leads me to believe you formed this opinion without ever
         | exploring it. Plan 9 is built for a networked world like the
         | one we live in. Perhaps you should study it a bit more before
         | drawing such conclusions.
         | 
         | I'd suggest you check out the adventuresin9 youtube channel.
        
           | packetlost wrote:
           | I did. I really wanted to like Plan 9, but I fail to see how
           | it will ever be more than anything than a research system for
           | playing around with. I read the Plan 9 Architecture paper,
           | deployed to VMs (because that's about the only thing it will
           | run on), and gave it's design decisions serious
           | consideration. The virtual union filesystem I think has
           | merit, but it's not without tradeoffs. If we want to see Plan
           | 9 in any form used in serious, I think it would have to be as
           | a virtual userspace implemented on top of Linux with more
           | serious thought given to performance, error handling, and
           | introspection.
        
             | MisterTea wrote:
             | > (because that's about the only thing it will run on)
             | 
             | Sounds like you aren't running 9front. 9front runs on lots
             | of things. We just had a hackathon in early august and
             | there were numerous PC's running 9front. adventuresin9 is
             | working on a pine phone port along with a bunch of mips and
             | arm devices. You aren't paying attention to what is
             | important and instead getting mired in the tediousness of
             | applications.
             | 
             | > I think it would have to be as a virtual userspace
             | implemented on top of Linux with more serious thought given
             | to performance, error handling, and introspection.
             | 
             | There is no point in that at all. The advantage of plan 9
             | is plan 9's architecture - its not an application. Might as
             | well use p9p on Linux with a rio theme. The only issue in
             | terms of performance is 9p latency over distances but these
             | are fixable problems. But over a LAN its not an issue.
             | Patches welcome. Lastly: "error handling, and
             | introspection" - you need to clarify these as this just
             | reads as fluff.
        
           | jstanley wrote:
           | > I'd suggest you check out the adventuresin9 youtube
           | channel.
           | 
           | Unless I'm mistaken, there is no way to watch YouTube on Plan
           | 9, which rather reinforces the point that it is not made for
           | the modern world, no?
        
             | rcarmo wrote:
             | Actually, there is (I spotted a YouTube downloader
             | someplace), but besides that "point", the videos in that
             | channel are _very_ interesting if you care anything about
             | modern microprocessors (he's ported Plan9 to quite a few
             | devices).
        
             | linguae wrote:
             | This has less to do with the technical merits of Plan 9 and
             | more to do with the fact that nobody has ported a modern
             | web browser to Plan 9 (there are some browsers, but none
             | with the feature parity of Firefox or Chrome). A slightly
             | easier route to YouTube support for Plan 9 would be if
             | somebody ported youtube-dl, but this work is also non-
             | trivial.
             | 
             | It's the classic chicken-and-egg problem of adopting new
             | platforms: the platform needs software to attract users,
             | but developers won't develop unless there are users or
             | there's a high likelihood users will come. It's not that
             | Plan 9 isn't made for our world; it's just that
             | Linux/Windows/macOS/BSD and their software ecosystems are
             | good enough for many users, and those who want to take
             | advantage of Plan 9's features have to contend with a lack
             | of software in many domains. It's similar to the reason I
             | code in Python for my machine learning job despite the fact
             | I'd prefer a Lisp or a statically-typed functional
             | programming language: Python has a far richer ecosystem of
             | machine learning and data science libraries.
        
             | MisterTea wrote:
             | http://wiki.9front.org/youtube
             | 
             | If that is unsatisfactory then you can either A. use vmx(1)
             | to run Linux and run a browser in there. or B. write code
             | and contribute instead of complaining.
             | 
             | Though what does youtube have to do with modern computing?
             | It's just an application. I'm talking about the underlying
             | architecture.
        
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       (page generated 2023-09-05 23:01 UTC)