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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

Forcing everything into the single abstraction of the filesystem lets do useful things with less trouble than other systems. As an example: Plan 9 doesn't have any use for containers because in its world chroot is exhaustive. You don't need special namespaces to control ex. network access, because network access goes through a filesystem in your chroot.

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So, what you are saying is we need a cat with a phat wallet to fund development on the thing and make it sleek.

It would really be a real competitor with linux in the server market.

Maybe, though what I was trying to get at with my comment still isn't really addressed. It seems like if you're making everything a filesystem and making it so that the OS doesn't care about where the filesystem is, it can be very easy for latency costs to pile up.

I really should properly play with it, but it always seemed to me that it has the potential to add milliseconds of cost to each operation and that could be very slow.

Just because you can run it over the network doesn't mean you have to. Like, yeah, you can run Linux with root on NFS and yes it can make you vulnerable to latency problems, but you can also run Plan 9 completely on a single machine with all the myriad filesystems coming from from the local system (mostly virtual, but some actually hitting disk).

If you mean that microkernels ping-ponging between kernel and user space can impact perf: Maybe? I'd really want to see benchmarks.

> we need a cat with a phat wallet to fund development on the thing

Yup. I tried to bounce the idea of Mark Shuttleworth when I last interviewed him, but he wasn't interested.

You probably didn't take enough pop-psychology IQ test phone screens and write a long enough essay about how well you did in high-school math. If you had said you had proved the Collatz Conjecture when you were fourteen he probably would have listened.

At least that's the impression that I got from their interview process.

Harsh but not unfair.

Just to clarify, though: I wasn't interviewing for a job, I was interviewing the man for El Reg.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/11/mark_shuttleworth_ubu...

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