[MichaelGG]

That all sounds neat, but how does it work on less than ideal networks? The non trivial jitter and latency would mess up programs that assume things are local. Even things like buffering audio needs to be network aware. If local, low latency can be achieved. If remote, then buffer to avoid skips.

I'm a bit suspicious of things that make network access transparent.

[stormbrew]

I think the thing people tend to miss in looking at plan9 is that, it being true that the infrastructure it provided doesn't explicitly solve all these last-mile problems people have with network transparency, it does solve several major problems you come to before you can even reason about that. Having a uniform network protocol, a reasonable multi-node security model, and a workable method of uniformly addressing remote resources are the horse, what you do with it is the cart.

[rakoo]

Certainly horrible if we were to switch to it now, but if it had caught on, maybe we would have put more money on improving networks instead of improving CPUs.

OTOH, Plan 9 was designed as a company-global "machine": you have a room filled with CPU clusters and storage clusters, and your own simple, stupid terminal to manage your resources. But your terminal is only a view; ultimately the data lives in the storage cluster and is processed in the CPU cluster.

Take a look at this page, notably the figure 1:

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9

As you can see, CPU and storage were expected to live on a high-speed, low-latency link because most of the data would fly between those two. Your terminal was expected to be anywhere else, possibly on the other end of a slow ethernet cable, and would coordinate the transmission of data from there. But most of the transmission would be between CPUs and storage. It wasn't supposed to be a truly p2p decentralized model.

[jacquesm]

QnX does all this and more and it works quite well. NFS is just a particularly botched implementation of an attempt at network transparency.

[_3u10]

Yup, as anyone who has ever run a program that accesses files over NFS knows it all sounds very wonderful on paper and absolutely sucks in real life.