[rescue] Sprite OS trouble.

[Mike Meredith]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:01:51 -0800, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Mike Meredith wrote:
> > I may be totally wrong, but I don't think so. From my recollection
> > 
> > (Of course I probably shouldn't use the past tense)
> 
> Well, I've nevr used it myself, but I have a friend who's been playing
> 
> with it for some time, who explained it to me as installing on a 
> heterogeneous network and just treating -- and presenting --
> everything as one big pool of computing resources.  But I could have
> misunderstood.

Well that's one way of describing it. The Plan9 manual says "Plan 9 is a
distributed computing environment assembled from separate machines
acting as terminals, CPU servers, and file servers". I can't find the
index (the printout was too big for one ring binder) or I'd look deeper,
but the man page for fork() doesn't show any signs of being cluster
capable, the intro section for the system calls doesn't mention anything
resembling clustering, etc.

Of course my manual is from the earliest public release of Plan 9 so it
could have been added later.

On the gripping hand, there's indications that not all cpu servers ran
Plan 9 so it's theoretically possible to connect to a suitably
configured cluster as a cpu server.