Subject: [9fans] IWP9 2010 - Submissions deadline extended Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 13:56:32 -0700

Hello 9fans,

The deadline for paper and WIP submissions has been extended to Sept 6th. Please send in your submissions as soon as possible.

Thanks, -Skip

Post on 9fans

Skip Tavakkolian has posted an update on IWP9 5e, the post to 9fans is included below.

Subject: [9fans] IWP9 2010 - Update and reminder Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2010 10:23:43 -0700

Hello 9fans,

IWP9 2010 is shaping up to be an exciting event. We are happy to announce the following talks:

• Sape Mullender et al. will present a paper on a new Operating System that Bell Labs is working on.

• Charles Forsyth will give a talk on the state of Inferno, Limbo and related projects at Vita Nuova.

• Geoff Collyer et al. will give a talk on ongoing Plan 9 efforts at Bell Labs, including the Blue Gene port and ports to ARM boards and plugs, Virtex 4 and 5 Power PC FPGA and others.

• Ron Minnich will lead a "hack session", putting Plan 9 on small devices -- primarily the Sheeva/Guru plugs; other boards like the BeagleBoard and the Gumstix Overo are also encouraged.

Please note that the deadline for submitting your drafts is August 15th.

Thanks, -Skip

Skip Tavakkolian (9nut) has just announced the 5th edition of the International Workshop on Plan 9! This year's workshop is being held in Seattle, Washington, at REI HQ in the North Room from October 11 - 13. The event is being sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Information on hotel group rates will be made available on iwp9.org.

From: Skip Tavakkolian <9nut@9ne...>
Subject: Announcement: Fifth IWP9 - Oct 11-13 2010, Seattle WA
Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 20:14:25 -0700

Hello 9fans,

On behalf of the IWP9 Planning Committee, I am pleased to announce
that this year's workshop will be held in Seattle, Oct 11th through
13th.  The conference will include presented papers, works-in-progress
and workshops.  Please mark your calendars and start work on your
submissions.

The event will be held in the North Room at REI's flagship store --
a.k.a REI HQ -- in downtown Seattle.  Other information, including
information about the hotel with a group rate for IWP9 attendees will
be made available on the conference website as they become available.
Please visit:

http://www.iwp9.org

--Skip Tavakkolian

9fans thread

The interesting part of the Google Summer of Code has finally started, and we have six interesting and prospective projects this year.

Venkatesh Srinivas is working on an improved virtual memory manager for Plan 9.

    I am proposing to improve the virtual memory system of Plan 9 and to use the
    improved VM to implement a better libc memory allocator.

    Currently, Plan 9 allows programs to create anonymous memory segments; it
    has a limit of less than five segments per-process, however.  I propose
    replacing the limited per-process segment array with a structure that allows
    for a much larger number of segments and implementing a memory allocator
    that takes advantage of the liberal number of anonymous segments.

Mentor: Erick Quanstrom

Project page.

Jesus Galan is going to be intergrating some improvements to 9vx.

    When 9vx was released some years ago it was presented as an experiment, a
    demostration of what was possible combining vx32 and Plan9.  Time passed by
    and, today, the 9vx experiment can be considered a sucess: it is replacing
    drawterm in many Unix systems, is a good test bed for experimentation and
    trying Plan 9 is easier than ever.  The objective of this project is to
    integrate into the 9vx source some improvements done by 9fans and explore
    how to make it better.

Mentor: Devon O'Dell

Project page.

John David is working a Plan 9 approach to Heirarchical Patch Dynamics (9hpd)

    This project builds simulation and modeling tools used for
    spatially-explicit multiscale integrative modeling using a Plan 9
    reimplementation of the (HPD-MP).

    Successful completion will include a series of multiscale modeling examples
    running on 9vx and/or Inferno in a distribution that focuses on ease of use
    and accessibility for non-computer scientists.

Hierarchical Patch Dynamics Modeling Platform

Mentor: Ron Minnich

Project page.

Michael Block is doing work on input methods in Plan 9.

    I propose implementing a system that enables Plan 9 to accept non-English
    input.

Mentor: Noah Evans

Project page.

Andre Guenther is planning on porting drawterm to the iPhone.

    Goal of this project is to port drawterm to the iPhone.  Drawterm is a mean
    of making a cpu connection to a Plan 9 machine without running a Plan 9
    terminal.  With the possibility to mount client devices into the host system
    enables interesting interaction with the iPhone platform.  Thus, this port
    should also encourage future experimentation with the mobile usage of Plan9.
    Another interesting aspect is, how the mouse and keyboard driven interface
    of rio translates into a touchscreen based device.

Mentor: Jeff Sickel Project page.

Per Odlund is working on another arm port, this time to the IGEPv2.

    All though how great software might be, if we can't use it, it's value
    deteriorate.  One of the most common questions of people that want to try or
    expand their usage of plan9 is: does it work on x or y?  As the mobile
    devices get more and powerful it would be intressting to see the usage of
    plan9 in this area.  Adding support for IGEPv2 , Cortex A8 and armv7 is a
    first step in this direction.

Mentor: Charles Forsyth

Project page.

Geoff Collyer has provided news on the arm ports

From: geoff@pla...
Subject: changes to the ARM SoC ports
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:05:02 -0400

booting(8) has been updated; take a look if you're using an ARM port.

On the Kirkwood SoCs (Sheevaplug and Openrd-client), USB now works.
Nemo was helpful fixing this, as usual.

One of the people here is working on using the Kirkwood crypto
acceleration hardware.

The OMAP3530 port is now available in /sys/src/9/omap.  It currently
runs on the IGEPv2 board.  The hardware can execute VFPv3
floating-point instructions, but 5[cal] don't generate them yet, so
floating-point is currently emulated.  USB isn't quite working yet.
Once it is, we should be able to use USB Ethernet and thus run on
Beagleboards.  The ohci and ehci controllers are seen, but no devices
yet.  There are several USB errata that need to be looked into.  From
the latest omap3530 errata:

- 3.1.1.130 only one usb dma channel (rx or tx) can be active
    at one time: use interrupt mode instead
- 3.1.1.144 otg soft reset doesn't work right
- 3.1.1.183 ohci and ehci controllers cannot work concurrently
- §3.1.3 usb limitations: all ports must be configured to identical speeds
    (high vs full/low)

This port is being made available now primarily as a basis for GSoC
students; we expect it to improve.

Rae McLellan of Bell Labs deserves thanks for helping to decrypt what
passes for hardware documentation these days.

Mail thread here.

Information on the Plan 9 GSoC project is available here.

From: geoff@pla...
Subject: arm ports update
Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 23:42:50 -0400

The kw port now supports the Guruplug Server Plus, including both
Ethernet interfaces, and probably the other Guruplugs.  booting(8) now
has the necessary instructions to get started.  They are more diverse
than one might like because every version of u-boot we get for a new
board seems to have had the dhcp, bootp and tftp commands tinkered
with to behave slightly differently.  We have two Guruplugs and one
has been stable but the other is prone to random resets (and runs much
warmer than the Sheevaplugs).  I'd be interested in hearing from
anyone else who sees random resets.

I've imported the flash memory support from native Inferno, other than
the flash translation layer, which was developed for nor flash and is
suspect with nand flash.  flash(3) describes the interface.  It seems
to work on the Kirkwood boards, but I haven't exercised it
extensively.  It does implement software ECC.  /dev/flash looks like
it always returns zero bytes on the igepv2 board, but lack of
documentation makes it a little hard to tell what to expect.

Mail thread here.

Information on the kirkwood is available in this pdf. (5495468kb)