Notes on the Plan 9 3rd edition Kernel Source (2007) [pdf]

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu

58 points·adamnemecek··6 comments

Other plan9 papers:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/papers/

A cool gem, the WORM cached file system:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/seanq/cw.pdf

Later succeeded by Venti: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/

The greatest barrier to entry for me for using Plan 9 has always been the documentation, which I hope this will resolve for me. Sure, the man pages are comprehensive, but reading all of them is incredibly daunting and shouldn't be necessary. I have tried to buy the manual packages that Vita Nuovo purports to sell, but all the pages for it seem to be defunct. I have even tried emailing to custom order a copy, but no success.

There are explanatory papers that can sum up things far beyond what crawling through each man page would bring. That being said, there is (at least in the 9front project), a man section called "intro" that skims over most of the technical details and focuses rather on concepts and the basics.

To help in transition should you, or someone else be interested, here are some helpful links: http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/UNIX_to_Plan_9_com...

http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/FAQ/index.html

https://code.google.com/p/plan9front/w/list

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/

"Introduction to OS Abstractions Using Plan 9 From Bell Labs" by Francisco J Ballestros is a great help, too.

http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/_books/comp/plan9/Introductio...

I believe the documentation is installed in /sys/doc. At least 9Front does so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com