This talk will cover the context, origins, and core concepts of the Plan 9 operating system.
It will focus around Plan 9's high-level ideas that make it unique, and fundamentally different from Unix. This includes files, namespaces, the 9p protocol, networking, graphics, and the limitless potential of file servers, which can only be achieved due to its design.
I will aim to provide a genuine understanding of Plan 9's approach; not just what the concepts are, but why they exist and how they solve real problems that traditional Unix cannot.
Although this talk assumes familiarity with Unix-like systems, it is not required to understand what will be presented. In fact, heavy assimilation with Unix tends to be a handicap rather than an advantage.
GEFS is a new file system built for Plan 9. It aims to be a crash-safe, corruption-detecting, simple, and fast snapshotting file system, in that order. GEFS achieves these goals by building a traditional 9p file system interface on top of a forest of copy-on-write Bµ trees. It doesn�t try to be optimal on all axes, but good enough for daily use.
Over the past two decades, Plan 9 has seen many improvements and contributions and been made accessible on modern hardware by projects such as 9front. While appealing for certain tasks, audio processing has not been in the spotlight much. Despite the many ports and tools now available, information about them is splintered across many websites and code repositories and it can be difficult to piece together the overall picture. In particular, Plan 9 typically isn't known for music production, yet while it cannot approach the feature set of modern digital audio workstations (DAWs) on other systems, it is quite capable. This talk will explore the topic of audio processing on Plan 9 from a musician's perspective, show what can be done currently, and discuss its limitations and needs. Basic knowledge of Plan 9 is assumed. Topics covered: driver support, decoding/encoding, audio players, recording and editing, visualization, MIDI tools, trackers, synthesis, production.