Grave Robbers from Outer Space: Using 9P2000 Under Linux

This paper describes the implementation and use of the Plan 9 distributed resource protocol 9P under the Linux 2.6 operating system. The use of the 9P protocol along with the recent addition of private name spaces to the 2.6 kernel creates a foundation for seamless distributed computing using Linux. We review the design principles and benefits of Plan 9 distributed systems, go over the basics of the 9P protocol, describe 9P extensions to better support UNIX® file systems, and show some example Linux distributed applications using 9P to provide system and application services. We conclude by providing a performance analysis of the protocol versus NFS for sharing a static file system.