Plan 9 — The Documents (Volume 2)
Introduction
Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Sean Dorward, Bob Flandrena, Ken Thompson, Howard Trickey, and Phil Winterbottom
An overview of the system; read at least this paper before you install.
Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Ken Thompson, Howard Trickey, and Phil Winterbottom
What’s in a name?
Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom
Connecting the pieces. The details in the paper are outdated but the ideas still apply.
Russ Cox, Eric Grosse, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Sean Quinlan
An overview of the security architecture.
Programming
Rob Pike
The starting point for C programming under Plan 9.
Rob Pike
An overview of the changes to the C library since the Third Release.
Howard Trickey
Moving C code between UNIX and Plan 9.
Phil Winterbottom
An overview paper about the Acid debugger.
Phil Winterbottom
The reference manual for the language and its libraries.
Andrew G. Hume and Bob Flandrena
An introduction to Plan 9’s replacement for make.
Bob Flandrena
The conventions for using mk in Plan 9.
Rob Pike
Things you’d rather not know.
User Interfaces
Rob Pike
An introduction to the (previous) window system and its unusual implementation.
Tom Duff
An introduction to the new shell, complete with examples.
Rob Pike
Sam is the standard editor on Plan 9.
Rob Pike
A system with a more radical approach to programming and editing.
Rob Pike
Inter-process communication that enlivens the interactive user interface.
Implementation
Rob Pike and Ken Thompson
The details about Plan 9’s character set: the Unicode Standard plus an ASCII-compatible encoding.
Ken Thompson
The design and some internals of the compiler suite.
Bob Flandrena
The procedures necessary to add a new instruction set to Plan 9’s programming environment.
Ken Thompson
The design of the central file server and its novel backup system.
Sean Quinlan and Sean Dorward
Archival block-level storage using secure hashes as block identifiers.
Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom
A description of the Internet protocol Plan 9 uses for internal communication.
Rob Pike
A vexing old problem solved: how to make pwd get the right answer in the face of multiply-bound directories.
Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Ken Thompson, and Gerard Holzmann
A detailed study of a central issue in the Plan 9 kernel.
Miscellany
Paul Glick
Adminstering the suite of tools to drive PostScript printers.
Joseph F. Ossanna and Brian W. Kernighan
The old warhorse, updated for Unicode characters.
Gerard Holzmann
An introduction to a tool for analyzing parallel and distributed programs.
Installation
The hardware requirements for the Plan 9 compilers and kernels.
