The use of name spaces in Plan 9

  • Authors:
  • Rob Pike;Dave Presotto;Ken Thompson;Howard Trickey;Phil Winterbottom

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
  • Year:
  • 1993
  • Names

    Distributed systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

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.