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Ask HN: Has 9p (plan 9 protocol) ever been used seriously?

12 points by robobro ↗ HN
The question is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. I've been teaching myself Limbo programming lately and studying the design of Inferno (including with the Plan 9 protocol which inspired many aspects of the OS) but I'm not really finding many applications that really use the 9P/Styx protocol on the internet. It seems like Plan9 never really took off, neither did Inferno.

If you know of any serious usage of the 9P protocol or have experience working on it, or any takes on it, it'd be very educational!

6 comments

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ggm
Rob Pike works for Google now. He used to be responsive to reasonable questions but (from my personal experience as a time-waster) very intolerant of time wasters.

Charles Forsyth did a lot of limbo work, he is also responsive to well formed, reasonable questions.

gnufx
I don't know anything about that usage, but I've seen it mentioned in connexion with libvirt, and I assume there's a good reason it's maintained in NFS-Ganesha, though I haven't used it: https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/wiki/9p

9p appears to be used on Tri-Labs HPC systems, which tend to be serious, if not entirely open: https://github.com/chaos/diod, https://github.com/chaos/9nbd; I'd seriously consider what they do if I had free reign building a new HPC system.