Is 9P obsolete?

Question

I'm interested in studying the 9P FS, currently been reading the source available from these implementations: http://9p.cat-v.org/implementations

Is 9P obsolete? Are you using it for some application?

(also I've found this, some perfomance test between 9P and NFS: http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/2007/08/v9fs-performance-versus-nfs.html)

Answer 1

No, 9P isn't obsolete; I don't know of a protocol that does what it does and is clean and well defined enough to be implemented correctly in almost any language that exists.

9P is used in a variety of systems. A couple of recent uses in arm-js (an ARM emulator) and 9webdraw (a GSoC project that implements the Plan 9 /dev/draw). Both are HTML5 Javascript implementations.

Answer 2

Just to add a bit, both the Linux client implementation and several servers are under active development, so I'd say that's a pretty clear sign that folks still have use for it. One of the areas its seen heavy use more recently is the virtio-9P (aka virtfs) which is part of qemu/kvm and can be used for direct guest to host file access. It's also been used in several experimental operating systems projects (Libra, PROSE, FusedOS) and incorporated into other operating systems (BSD, MacOSX, Windows, Linux) and hypervisors (in addition to the KVM instance above, its also been incorporated in various ways into Xen). 9P is actually being used in supercomputing deployments (both for Plan 9 and Linux, see the diod project on Sourceforge).

I think the reason is that the protocol is quite simple, so implementations also tend to be quite simple and easy to integrate elsewhere (there are several applications both inside and outside the Plan 9 world which use 9P as an interface to the application, in much the same way that some web developers use RESTful interfaces).

The protocol has a couple of different variations including the 9P.L variant which was developed specifically to match the Linux VFS API better. It adds a bit of complexity to the protocol in the addition of operations, but removes some of the complexity of mapping Linux VFS API -> 9P and vice versa.

Answer 3

It is used in Erlang-on-Xen both as a storage protocol for goofs http://erlangonxen.org/blog/goofs-simple-filesystem

It is the way erlang on xen instances in other ways too, see here:

http://erlangonxen.org/more/9p2000e

Also, it's used by libvirt stuff with QEMU.

http://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup

9p, to me, is like the Scheme of network protocols. For the most part, it is very simple, but people see need to extend it to fit their environments. Luckily this is done in ways that are often backwards compatible.

Answer 4

In addition to everything mentioned in the other answers, Microsoft is using 9P as part of their Windows Subsystem for Linux.

They add a 9P server to each Linux distribution that is running as a guest, so that Windows can mount the Linux filesystem over 9P, and Windows processes can transparently access the files on Linux's ext4 partition.