> But the question in my mind for a while > has been, is it time for another step back and rethinking > the big picture?
Maybe, and maybe what we ought to look at is precisely what Plan 9 skipped, with good reason, in its infancy: distributed "core" resources or "the platform as a filesystem". What struck me when first looking at Xen, long after I had decided that there was real merit in VMware, was that it allowed migration as well as checkpoint/restarting of guest OS images with the smallest amount of administration. Today, to me, that means distributed virtualisation. So, back to my first impression: Plan 9 would make a much better foundation for a virtualiser than any of the other OSes currently in use (limited to my experience, there may be something in the league of IBM's 1960s VMS (do I remember right? sanctions made IBM a little scarce in my formative years) out there that I don't know about). Given a Plan 9 based virtualiser, are we far from using long-running applications and migrating them in flight from whichever equipment may have been useful yesterday to whatever is handy today? The way I see it, we would progress from conventional utilities strung together with Windows' crappy glue to having a single "profile" application, itself a virtualiser's guest, which includes any activities you may find useful online. It sits on the web and follows you around, wherever you go. It is engineered against any possible failures, including security-related ones and is always there for you. Add Venti to its persistent objects and you can also rewind to a better past state. Do you not like it? It smacks of Inferno and o/mero on top of a virtualiser-enhanced Plan 9. Those who might prefer the conventional Windows/Linux platforms may have to wait a little longer before they figure out how to catch up :-) ++L
