9front ships its “THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN” release

The 9front project, the liveliest of the forks of the legendary Plan 9 from Bell Labs, has shipped another release. As tradition dictates, it comes with a code name — this time the slightly weary “THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN.” Sections like “Acknowledgments,” whose sole entry reads “For what?”, hint that the developers' sense of humor hasn't gone anywhere, even if the fun has thinned out a bit.

What's new

Among the notable changes is a reworked affinewarp API, now used by many programs for scaling and zooming, including the page viewer, the Doom port and the game-console emulators. There's a new gdbfs(4) tool that lets you mount a remote gdb as a /proc directory — very much in the spirit of Plan 9, where everything is a file.

Hardware support has been added: a Synaptics touchpad driver, an nusb/battery driver for uninterruptible power supplies and an nusb/dump utility for dumping USB descriptors. The libsec cryptographic library has gained SHA3 support, and the classic awk has finally gotten a test suite. The kernel for the pc and pc64 platforms can now work with x2APIC.

File system and tools

The bulk of the work, judging by the changelog, went into the gefs file system: dozens of fixes to reference counting, snapshot handling, crash recovery and integrity checking. One of the commits is tersely titled “the comment lies” — rare honesty in a bug-fix description.

The built-in git client has seen serious work: overflows in packfile parsing have been fixed, partial commits (commit -p) have been added, and the handling of subdirectories and submodules has been corrected. A host of small fixes touched the upas mail system, the rio window manager and the network stack.

Where to get it

Images are offered for PCs, the Raspberry Pi (versions 1–4), the MNT Reform laptop and QEMU. For a PC it's enough to write the .iso to a disc or straight to a USB drive; for single-board machines, unpack the .img onto a memory card; the QEMU images come in QCOW2 format.

Plan 9 long ago ceased to be an operating system for everyday work, remaining instead a living architectural experiment and an object of affection for a small but devoted community. The very fact that, years on, someone keeps writing touchpad drivers and fixing network cards for this system is worthy of respect in itself — even if it's no longer as much fun as it was supposed to be.

Source: Lobsters