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by rodgerd 4509 days ago
It's quite fascinating, in lights of the idelogical bunfights over kdbus, systemd, and Wayland which are plaguing the Linux world, to look at what the designers of Linux did as a followup: binary IPC is baked in. Everything is a file. And so on.
1 comments
jff 4509 days ago
These guys didn't design Linux; it would work better if they had. They created Unix.

Also, know how you do init in Plan 9? You add commands to an init file, and they run when the machine boots. If a service goes down for some reason, you GO RESTART IT YOURSELF.

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mercurial 4508 days ago
> Also, know how you do init in Plan 9? You add commands to an init file, and they run when the machine boots. If a service goes down for some reason, you GO RESTART IT YOURSELF.

Are you saying that lack of process monitoring is a feature? The "add commands to init" thingie has simplicity going for it, and reminds me of the little I've seen of Arch's old init scripts, but I'm not interested in figuring out the dependency order of my services by experimentation, or giving up parallel initialization.

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rodgerd 4509 days ago
> These guys didn't design Linux; it would work better if they had. They created Unix.

I'm glad in your haste to snark on a typo you managed to leap over all the bits that don't correspond with your worldview.

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lmm 4509 days ago
But it's ok because plan 9 services don't crash?
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nousernamesleft 4509 days ago
Correct. Just like unix. If something crashes, there is a serious problem. Restarting it blindly is typically going to do more harm than good (allowing the attacker who crashed it infinite chances to keep trying to exploit the bug rather than just crash the process). When something crashes, you fix it, you don't just restart it and pretend that is supposed to happen.
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rodgerd 4509 days ago
> If something crashes, there is a serious problem

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Providing the system owner the ability to make that decision is a feature.

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rbanffy 4508 days ago
Yes, but this should never be the default. If something crashed, it's often a sign of an underlying problem that should be solved. Programs crash for a reason.

I've seen many "Windows import" sysadmins who think it's perfectly natural to reboot a server because something is not working. It's not. Automatic restart of crashed processes should be the exception (as in "we need to keep the reactor core cool") rather than the norm.

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nousernamesleft 4509 days ago
The plan 9 team do not consider it a feature. Hence it does not exist.
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