thm 2005-09-24 Summary -Diff-

NEW WEBSITE / WIKI -- URIEL

INFERNO WIKI AND CHAOS (NOT PLANNED)

• Uriel asked forsyth about the plan, to have a business oriented and hacker style website, on the Inferno mailinglist.
• Forsyth said, that the wiki, for which Caerwyn volunteered, should be the hacker style website.
• Uriel asked, if Inferno and Plan 9 things could be kept centralized.
• Forsyth said, that he does not disagree.
• Nemo asked for a central service register.
• Gdiaz said, that the 9grid nodes could be used for that role.
• In the further discussion about the divergence of Plan 9 and Inferno drivers was a new model, like /sys/src/pc-drivers
• chaos

9CON.MADRID -- URIEL

• Uriel hopes to show up.
• Nemo said, that they want to poll the university to get support.
• Two options were given: december or may
• Uriel said, that many of the people are at CCC and so december would be overkill.

PLAN B -- NEMO

21:01 <Nemo> Well, we just wanted two things:
21:01 <Nemo> - avoid static mounts and let the system adapt to FS availability
21:02 <Nemo> - follow the "everything is a file" idea to the limit.
21:02 <Nemo> For example, I was disappointed because in rio I couldnt
21:02 <Nemo> use files to operate on widgets and the like.
21:02 <Nemo> In the same way, I couldn't copy an mp3 file to somewhere to make it play.
21:03 <Nemo> The same happen to other services. But most notably, the UI.
21:03 <Nemo> What we do is to announce resources to the network, and then mount them using our
21:04 <Nemo> volume stuff (dynamic mounts, really).
21:04 <Nemo> For example, mount -U /what /what
21:04 <Nemo> is what we use to get in /what
21:04 <Nemo> the union of all file trees for information about things.
21:04 <Nemo> A result is that you can ls /what to see what machines are around.
21:05 <Nemo> The same for other resources. For example, we use du to locate
21:05 <Nemo> things like button:Pause (pause buttons) in UIs found
21:05 <Nemo> at /devs/*ui/ or any other place.
21:05 <Nemo> Then we can 'echo press' >/devs/....../button:Pause/ctl
21:06 <Nemo> to press the button. I think this gives the idea.
21:06 <Nemo> There are two things that are really useful: being able to import
21:07 <Nemo> resources without having to mount them by hand, and 2, having a
21:07 <Nemo> very detailed interface for services (having a file for the button).

• Nemo said, that he wants to include these ideas into Plan 9.
• He said, that he finished volfs for Plan 9:

21:12 <Nemo> The daemon sends/listens for announces,
21:13 <Nemo> file servers register with /srv/vols to let volfs know that there's anew service.
21:13 <Nemo> (if you want to, of course)
21:13 <Nemo> So, your volfs knows of several FSs
21:13 <Nemo> that have a given name, and a set of constraints.
21:13 <Nemo> For example, /usr/nemo!Unemo!Lhome!Cok
21:14 <Nemo> which means, this thing is a file tree for "/usr/nemo"
21:14 <Nemo> that is owned by nemo, located at home (whatever that might mean), and the
21:14 <Nemo> latency of the connection from your machine to the FS seems to be good enough
21:14 <Nemo> to page-in binaries.
21:15 <Nemo> Well, the point is that volfs has the list of known volumes.
21:15 <Nemo> Then, you mount volumes from it:
21:15 <Nemo> mount /srv/vols /usr/nemo /usr/nemo!Cok
21:15 <Nemo> which means, you mount at /usr/nemo
21:15 <Nemo> the spec "/usr/nemo/!Cok".
21:16 <Nemo> The daemon takes care of supplying a file tree that matches your request.

• Gdiaz asked, if it does hot swap.
• Nemo answered, that it does something like this, as you request a "resource" and not hold just the fid.
• Nemo showed examples on the usage of volfs. (See the logs.)

AFTERSHOW

• Uriel asked about kencc.
• Forsyth said, that he is working on the tarball.