Plan9 Operating System

Plan9 from Bell Labs is an open-source distributed system from the creators of Unix. I love the design of this operating system and I continue to work with it today.

I have contributed to the operating system at several points, mostly to fix problems I encountered while using it. It is still very pleasant to use. You will find some of my work related to Plan9 below.

9vx

June 2010

After a year recovering from a burnout, I went back to my roots and worked on Plan9. I found and fixed a nasty bug in 9vx, a port of the Plan 9 kernel to the vx32 user-mode virtualization environment.

The problem was related to the process scheduler in Plan9, because the authors of 9vx made false assumptions about the operating system’s thread scheduler. It was a very complicated bug to identify and fix. I provide more detailed explanations on the comp.os.plan9 archived mailing list.

VIA Gigabit Ethernet Driver

Summer 2006

I had an ABit AV8 Motherboard that came with a VIA Gigabit ethernet driver. I could not resist stealing some register defines from FreeBSD and performing my own implementation of the driver.

ATI/AMD Radeon Driver

June 2003

I still have this great ATI Radeon 4600 video card and its DVI ports.

Matrox G4[50]0 Driver

August 2001

This was my first published code for Plan9. Matrox sent me the documentation for the G400 graphic chipset. It was very interesting to work on this code.

PA