seminar topic

PLAN 9 Operating system:-
By the mid 1980 s, the trend in computing was
away from large centralized time-shared
computers towards networks of smaller,
personal machines, typically UNIX `workstations .
People had grown weary of overloaded,
bureaucratic timesharing machines and were
eager to move to small, self-maintained systems,
even if that meant a net loss in computing power.
As microcomputers became faster, even that
loss was recovered, and this style of computing
remains popular today.Plan 9 began in the late
1980 s as an attempt to have it both ways: to
build a system that was centrally administered
and cost-effective using cheap modern
microcomputers as its computing elements.
The idea was to build a time-sharing system
out of workstations, but in a novel way.
Different computers would handle different
tasks: small, cheap machines in people s
offices would serve as terminals providing
access to large, central, shared resources
such as computing servers and file servers.
For the central machines, the coming wave
of shared-memory multiprocessors seemed
obvious candidates.Plan 9 is designed around
this basic principle that all resources appear as
files in a hierarchical file system, which is unique
to each process. As for the design of any
operating system various things such as the
design of the file and directory system implementation
and the various interfaces are important.
Plan 9 has all these well-designed features.
All these help to provide a strong base for
the operating system that could be well suited
in a distributed and networked environment.
The different features of Plan 9 operating
system are: The dump file system makes a
daily snapshot of the file store available to
the users. Unicode character set supported
throughout the system. Advanced kernel
synchronization facilities for parallel processing.
Security- there is no super-user or root user
and the passwords are never sent over the network..
satya prakash tiwari
b.tech(c.s.e)