Glendix has been making the rounds on the web lately, with coverage from OSNews, Reddit, and even a Russian site, Linux.org.ru. It’s really motivating to see some buzz around the project, giving me the extra boost needed to push the completion of a usable release!

Some of the major obstacles that have to be crossed before making a beta-quality release are the completion of critical synthetic filesystems - especially /net and /draw. We also have to work out the kinks with per-process namespaces and union mounts. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Rio running as a WM before an official release; if not, Plan9Port’s Rio and WMII are good candidates.

The biggest criticism of Glendix seems to be the reasoning that Plan9 user-space tools are somehow superior to their GNU counterparts, and several people have asked us to substantiate our claims. At this point, however, I don’t think that it is really important, or even relevant. Even if Plan9 user-space tools aren’t somehow superior - I think it is generally a refreshing idea to see Linux combined with a user-space other than GNU.

We’re at FOSS.IN this year, where a large number of kernel developers have gathered; and I hope to get some of their valuable input on the problems Glendix currently faces, and maybe even write some code to solve them

Thanks for all the community support and critical comments, they are all very vital feedback for the project and are much appreciated!

A comprehensive project report has been uploaded - it should give a pretty good idea of the project as a whole and give the interested developer something to start with. A shorter, more concise paper which was be presented at IWP9 has also been put up.

A Wiki has also been installed, initially with a few notes on downloading, installing and using Glendix. Feel free to add more information as necessary!

There will be a brief presentation of Glendix at the 3rd international workshop on Plan 9. Do drop by if you can, there is bound to be some interesting discussion at the event - and we will tackle some of the more tricky parts of our objective

Hope to see you there!

A quick status update: 13 system calls have been implemented - just enough to get a basic set of utilities running. So far we have cat, sed, grep, 8c and a few others to run. Notable executables that don’t work are 8l, ls, awk and sam (either because they look for filesystems that aren’t there, or depend on stat which isn’t implemented correctly as of yet).

Grab sources via git from here.

All the files inside syscall/ are to be put inside the linux kernel tree (replacing files with the same name). The files inside loader/ are just a normal kernel module. Both together will let you execute native Plan 9 binaries in Linux.

Patches, comments and suggestions are most welcome!

GNU/Linux is a popular free operating system in use today. GNU/Linux strives to be strictly compliant with POSIX standards, and is thus tied down with several requirements and thereby ceases to be innovative as far as operating system design is concerned.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs, on the other hand, was designed to be a from-scratch successor to UNIX. The Plan 9 operating system offers several new features that are both useful and efficient in today’s era of personal computing: synthetic file systems, the “everything is a file” concept, per-process namespaces and a fresh look at graphics and text editors are just a few.

The Plan 9 kernel, however, is relatively new and thus supports only a bare minimum of hardware. That is one of the reasons of its unpopularity. The Linux kernel on the other hand has had years of development behind it, and enjoys the support of several hardware components and developers alike.

This project aims to combine the Plan 9 user-space with the Linux kernel, to offer today’s developer an exciting environment combining the best features of both the worlds. Stay tuned for more updates!