Introduction to 9front

What is 9front?

Plan9front (or 9front) is a fork of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. The project was started to remedy a perceived lack of devoted development resources inside Bell Labs, and has accumulated various fixes and improvements.

This FQA specifically covers only the most recent release of 9front.

Cirno

At some point, Cirno became associated with 9front. Details are sketchy, but this image has been in the wiki since the Google Code days, so I'm leaving it in.

Pro.

• girl
• has magical powers
• associated with 9
• upsets kfx
• she is known to be the strongest

Alternatives.

On what systems does 9front run?

9front runs on the following platforms: • 386 • amd64 • arm • arm64 • mips

Read: FQA 3.2 - Selecting Hardware

Why might I want to use 9front?

It is very likely that you do not.

New users frequently want to know whether 9front is superior to some other free UNIX-like operating system. Consider: The question is largely unanswerable. What are your criteria? Why are you even using computers in the first place? Exploring these questions and the implications that derive therefrom may help you sharpen your perceptions and eventually come to some sort of conclusion about which operating system you prefer to use for daily tasks.

Ultimately, whether or not 9front is for you is a question only you can answer.

Note: The above text is lightly plagiarized from the OpenBSD FAQ.

Why might I not want to use 9front?

Hold up. Before you get too excited, consider the following possibilities:

• You just realized you don't want to use Plan 9 at all.
• You don't like the people who use and/or work on 9front.
• You don't like 9front's propaganda.
• You prefer less functionality from your obscure OS, and/or you prefer to ignore 9front's public commit history and complain later because nobody informed you about bug fixes and new programs.
• You have technical objections to specific changes 9front made to the original Bell Labs code.
• You're not sure right now, but you'll know it when you see it.

Okay, carry on.

Why did 9front stop making fun of Nazis?

Because you asked us to.

• People complained it was done in poor taste.
• People reliably interpret any depiction of a thing as an endorsement of same.
• We're tired of explaining this shit to people who just call us liars anyway. (To be fair, look at the world around us today. Why cloud the issue?) I'm through explainin the shit -- Ice T
• Cognitive dissonance.

Read: Appendix L - Ruby

Possibly related: Der Anbräuner

Definitely relevant: They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo

This poor guy: Anselm Kiefer

New Features

The following list is probably not exhaustive:

• /shr, global mountpoint device shr(3)
• /mnt is provided by mntgen(4)
• #A, audio drivers for sb16, intel hd audio and ac97 (both playback and recording supported!) audio(3)
• New BIOS based boot loader 9boot(8) featuring a console and support for FAT/ISO/PXE and being small (<8K)
• New EFI based boot loader efi
• Made kernel compliant to multiboot specification so it can be booted by qemu or grub directly.
• Interruptable kernel qlocks (eqlock)
• Deferred clunks (closeproc) for cached mounts
• New rc based boot(8) allows breaking into a shell at any time
• Default file system is an improved cwfs(4) (cwfs64x)
• New screen fonts: dejavu, germgoth, vga
• No central replica; source updates are done with git (1) (Mercurial)
• Keyboard events with /dev/kbd. Read: kbdfs (8) and rio (4)
• /lib/rob and other new corpuses, suitable as fodder for fortune(1) and other rhetorical programs
• New listen(8) -p maxprocs option.
• Always available network aan(8) support in cpu(1) and rcpu(1)
• MSI (message signalled interrupts), avoids problems with broken MP tables. Read: icanhasmsi(8)
• Legacy free ACPI support (aml interpreter libaml, mp interrupt routing, scram)
• Added rio(1) -b option (black window backgrounds) and look menu option
• USB CD-ROM boot/install
• USB drive bootI
• Improved USB mouse support
• Support for USB ptp cameras
• Stable-across-machines USB device names
• VGA initialization done by interpreting the VESA BIOS with realemu(8), working VESA screen blanking.
• /dev/kbd and clipboard charset support for vnc(1)
• New webfs(4) with HTTP1.1 and Keep-Alive support.
• Qemu/KVM virtio block device and ethernet drivers. Read: FQA 4.5.1.3 - Virtio
• Mouse wheel and chording support in sam(1)
• Elliptic curve cryptography ec(2)
• Working interrupt key (Del) in console
• WiFi support with wpa/wpa2
• SSE support
• System-wide support for internationalized domain names
• Unicode support in vt(1)
• pc64, kernel for amd64
• Numerous ciphers added and improvements made to libsec
• New dpi9k authentication protocol

New Programs

• " and "" (print, repeat previous command)
• alarm(1) -- timeouts in rc scripts
• atari(1) -- 2600 emulator
• audio(1) -- mp3, ogg, flac, µlaw, wav
• blit(1) -- Blit terminal emulator
• bullshit(1) -- print out a stream of bullshit
• cifsd(8) -- CIFS/SMB server
• cryptsetup (8) -- prepare an AES-encrypted partition to be used with the fs(3) device
• derp(1) -- find changes between directories
• dtracy(1) -- dynamic tracing language (like dtrace)

• feminize(1) -- replace sexist remarks
• fplot(1)
• New games: doom, glendy, linden, mandel, mines, mole, packet, v8e
• git(1) -- native git client
• hget(1) -- rewritten in rc, now uses webfs