The use of name spaces in Plan 9

ABSTRACT

Plan 9 is a distributed system built at the Computing Sciences Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories over the last few years. Its goal is to provide a production-quality system for software development and general computation using heterogeneous hardware and minimal software. A Plan 9 system comprises CPU and file servers in a central location connected together by fast networks. Slower networks fan out to workstation-class machines that serve as user terminals. Plan 9 argues that given a few carefully implemented abstractions it is possible to produce a small operating system that provides support for the largest systems on a variety of architectures and networks. The foundations of the system are built on two ideas: a per-process name space and a simple message-oriented file system protocol.

REFERENCES

• 1: [Killian] T. Killian, "Processes as Files", USENIX Summer Conf. Proc., Salt Lake City, 1984.
• 2: R. M. Needham, Names, Distributed systems, ACM, New York, NY, 1990 [doi>10.1145/90417.90741]
• 3: [Pike90] R. Pike, D. Presotto, K. Thompson, H. Trickey, "Plan 9 from Bell Labs", UKUUG Proc. of the Summer 1990 Conf., London, England, 1990.
• 4: [Presotto] D. Presotto, "Multiprocessor Streams for Plan 9", UKUUG Proc. of the Summer 1990 Conf., London, England, 1990.
• 5: [Pike91] Pike, R., "8.5, The Plan 9 Window System", USENIX Summer Conf. Proc., Nashville, 1991.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.7 Organization and Design
          Subjects: Distributed systems

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Design, Performance