[9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
Hi, I was looking for some open-source implementation work to be done as my master's project when I chanced upon the Plan 9 GSOC projects page. My interest is in networking, so I was particularly interested in projects about adding zeroconf networking and firewall support to Plan 9. I think I have sufficient knowledge of C/C++, but I haven't ever worked or used Plan 9, but have heard of it, so I would like to take this opportunity to get to know the system better and contribute to the community. I have a year with me to do the project, though the coursework is interlaced with classes, so I won't be able to dedicate 30-40 hrs per week like the GSOC students do ! So a year is a sufficient enough time I guess. Can someone please discuss with me how to proceed, and what are the things I should learn before starting on this ? I have already started reading the papers on Plan 9 and is starting to install the plan 9 on virtual box on my machine. -- Vinu Rajashekhar, 5th Year Dual Degree Student, Deptt of Computer Science Engg, IIT Kharagpur, India.
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
I think your first, best bet is to try to find out what the Plan 9 community needs, rather than adding on something that might not be the that important. I have not heard anyone express a need for zeroconf in Plan 9, but maybe I'm missing something. Simple example: file systems on Plan 9 are slow. Why is that? How do they work? How would you go about finding out how to make them faster? Linux has oprofile and (now) ftrace. Would either of these be helpful? Another simple example: networking on Plan 9 could be faster. What makes it less than it could be? How would you figure out how to fix it? Another example: we don't have much in the way of current graphics drivers. Why is that? How would you fix it? One mechanism we use to support graphics is VESA mode, which does not work in SMP. Why is that? Could you fix VESA code to work in SMP? This last project (VESA) is pretty self-contained and easily defined, you might want to start there. I think you need to spend some time climbing the learning curve before picking a project. ron
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:21 AM, ron minnichrminn...@gmail.com wrote: I think your first, best bet is to try to find out what the Plan 9 community needs, rather than adding on something that might not be the that important. I have not heard anyone express a need for zeroconf in Plan 9, but maybe I'm missing something. He was mining the GSoC idea archives -- and I had expressed a desire for zeroconf -- I'd really like to get rid of /lib/ndb/local as much as such a thing would be possible. We also need it for Blue Gene and Cloud environments since IP addresses are subject to change and need discovery. The zeroconf support itself is actually kind of trivial -- its coming up with a reasonable synthetic file system interface (for discovery as well as publishing) which would be the real contribution. -eric
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
Simple example: file systems on Plan 9 are slow. Why is that? How do they work? How would you go about finding out how to make them faster? which ones? there are quite a number to choose from. i've found that ken's fs beats the pants off nfs on similar hardware with literally one cpu tied behind its back. - erik
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
personally, i think the best contributions come from people who have a real personal need or better want to solve a problem, solve it and contribute the solution back to the community. i think that's why unix and plan 9 exist at all. so i would encourage folks who would like to contribute to find stuff they're intereted in. i also think that it may be a good idea for us to figure out how to help folks who would like to take on projects like this do so outside the framework of gsoc. i'm willing to contribute time to that end. - erik
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 10:52 PM, erik quanstromquans...@quanstro.net wrote: personally, i think the best contributions come from people who have a real personal need or better want to solve a problem, solve it and contribute the solution back to the community. Yes, I do agree with that. i think that's why unix and plan 9 exist at all. so i would encourage folks who would like to contribute to find stuff they're intereted in. i also think that it may be a good idea for us to figure out how to help folks who would like to take on projects like this do so outside the framework of gsoc. I wasn't thinking about doing this as a GSOC project, I wanted to do something for my master's project which was a hardcore open-source implementation, that's why I was going through the gsoc ideas page. i'm willing to contribute time to that end. - erik -- Vinu Rajashekhar, 5th Year Dual Degree Student, Deptt of Computer Science Engg, IIT Kharagpur, India.
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 1:07 PM, erik quanstromquans...@quanstro.net wrote: Simple example: file systems on Plan 9 are slow. Why is that? How do they work? How would you go about finding out how to make them faster? which ones? there are quite a number to choose from. i've found that ken's fs beats the pants off nfs on similar hardware with literally one cpu tied behind its back. Try this - build the source to charon over a 200ms link over 9p. Then try again over sshfs. Also, look at a single terminal with a local fossil install. Trace the path of an 'ls /'. Count the number of copies and context switches. Having the fastest file server in the world means nothing for file system performance when your path to it is a maze of twisty passages, all alike. -- vs
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
I wasn't thinking about doing this as a GSOC project, I wanted to do something for my master's project which was a hardcore open-source implementation, that's why I was going through the gsoc ideas page. makes sense to me. i'd incourage you to work a bit with the community. part of open source is fitting in with the community. also, there are two related ip projects that might be of interest to you: nat (non existent) and ip6 (needs work). - erik
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
Try this - build the source to charon over a 200ms link over 9p. Then try again over sshfs. why would you do this? why not run the compile closer to the source. this is the power of plan 9. Also, look at a single terminal with a local fossil install. Trace the path of an 'ls /'. Count the number of copies and context switches. Having the fastest file server in the world means nothing for file system performance when your path to it is a maze of twisty passages, all alike. again, this is not a typical install for a performance-sensitive system. and i don't know that anyone ever claimed fossil to be a high-performance file system. running a file system in user space is a matter of convienence, not performance. at coraid, we run a stand-alone ken's file server. ken's file server has no user space. so while there are context switches, those are really speedy. they take maybe a few hundred cycles. the real win is that no data is copied from/to user space and there is one global page table that is never changed. there are no tlb flushes. those can hurt. before the switch to nupas, we averaged 200MB/s of fileserver traffic during the day to 50 clients on a single, fairly pedestrian xeon 5000 machine with 3.5gb of usable memory. perhaps my standards are low and i'm out of touch, but i don't think nfs could do that well with that little. - erik
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
I see your point. It does sound like zeroconf would be useful to some people. I wonder if it could be done with a 9p orientation as eric suggested. I don't recall what the security issues are with zeroconf, but, if it's the microsoft-inspired version I'm thinking of, I would guess there are many. I wonder if Plan 9 could provide some angle to make it more secure? Anyway, I did not mean to discourage your enthusiasm; go for it and let us know what we can do to help. ron
[9fans] new sources
I've got a replacement for sources set up. It's a new machine (an Intel Core 2) named haggis.cs.bell-labs.com and should look like a slightly-old copy of sources. Please try it out and see if it looks like sources from your perspective. You may want to change your authdom declaration for outside.plan9.bell-labs.com in /lib/ndb to auth=haggis.cs.bell-labs.com authdom=outside.plan9.bell-labs.com while you try out haggis. If it checks out, I'll replace its copy of the sources fossil with a brand-new snapshot from a fresh dump of sources, so don't store anything precious on haggis during this check-out period. Please mail reports, good or bad, to me, not 9fans; there's no need to add to the volume of traffic on 9fans for this.
Re: [9fans] new sources
Please try it out and see if it looks like sources from your perspective. You may want to change your authdom declaration for outside.plan9.bell-labs.com in /lib/ndb to Geoff, I did a walk of /n/sources/contrib and /n/haggis/contrib, and the latter is missing quite a few files: 48257 48260 2624325 contrib 41701 41704 2260692 haggis 89958 89964 4885017 total Which could be because you haven't synced the current contrib tree. I don't see any difference in performance between the two (from roughly 92 milliseconds away on the net). --lyndon
Re: [9fans] new sources
Please mail reports, good or bad, to me, not 9fans; there's no need to add to the volume of traffic on 9fans for this. How about we convince the mailing list software to stop inserting Reply-To headers.
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
On Sun Aug 30 14:37:29 EDT 2009, rminn...@gmail.com wrote: One way to make this kind of interesting is to address how you'd do a reasonable zeroconf effort given that you need to boot 1m+ machines. We've booted 4400*250 VMs on a machine at sandia, and, let me tell you, it was a pain. It is amusing to watch the programs traverse million line /etc/hosts file -- for a while. how does this apply to plan 9? ndb already provides for indexed databases. but i have not tried this with millions of entries. - erik
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
Reposting this to 9fans: hola, First of all, I'm really glad you are considering Plan 9 for your project, thanks. Can someone please discuss with me how to proceed, and what are the things I should learn before starting on this ? you can start by reading nemo's intro Introduction to Operating Systems Abstractions Using Plan 9 from Bell Labs which covers pretty much everything you need to get started plus some advanced topics like how to implement a synthetic fileserver and others. http://lsub.org/who/nemo/9.intro.pdf if you need any specific help, feel free to get in touch with me. -- Federico G. Benavento
Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Federico G. Benaventobenave...@gmail.com wrote: Reposting this to 9fans: hola, First of all, I'm really glad you are considering Plan 9 for your project, thanks. Can someone please discuss with me how to proceed, and what are the things I should learn before starting on this ? you can start by reading nemo's intro Introduction to Operating Systems Abstractions Using Plan 9 from Bell Labs which covers pretty much everything you need to get started plus some advanced topics like how to implement a synthetic fileserver and others. http://lsub.org/who/nemo/9.intro.pdf Thank you, I am going through Plan 9 from Bell Labs and The Organization of Networks in Plan 9 right now. if you need any specific help, feel free to get in touch with me. Will do ! -- Federico G. Benavento
