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Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

by adriangrigore on 4/2/25, 3:29 PM with 92 comments

• by bradfitz on 4/2/25, 4:29 PM

  Happy to answer any questions!

  A bunch of us are currently in https://meet.google.com/qre-gydb-mkv chatting about this. (Edit: the hour is over; we all left)

  The earlier Apr 1st blog post was https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-enterprise-plan-9-suppo...

• by mfro on 4/2/25, 3:49 PM

  Russ Cox is an absolute legend for committing to this joke.

• by calvinmorrison on 4/2/25, 4:55 PM

  The 9fans list had this one for April Fools:

  Given the huge maintenance cost of immature computer architectures such as mips, 386, arm, arm64 and amd64, we decided to put our focus on the more mature and stable achitectures:

  power64 and itanuim.

  Therefore, all architectures other than power64 and itanium are thereby frozen, conserved and promoted to end of life.

• by packetlost on 4/2/25, 4:05 PM

  I unironically wish there was an enterprise version of Plan 9. I've been writing most of my scripts in `rc` (something my coworkers put up with because we use nix and I can pull it in automatically with dirnev) and it has been great.

• by raggi on 4/2/25, 7:00 PM

  In case y'all missed it in the first post, and you just want to try this out, it's working in this v86 image:

  https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=custom&m=768&vram=16&hda.url=ht...

  You can start tailscaled and tailscale inside the VM. It may take a while to come online sometimes due to limited proxy availability.

  Edit: alt gives you the third button. To start a terminal, hold alt and right click, select new, release alt, and right click drag to size the terminal window.

• by adriangrigore on 4/2/25, 4:08 PM

  Webinar in progress (Google Meet) https://ftp.plan9.ts.net/webinar

• by 0xbadcafebee on 4/2/25, 4:05 PM

  I like the premise of the joke, but then as the explanation ran on... I suddenly became depressed. So much broken stuff, so much complexity.... to, what, make a network tunnel? If all this extra work was the joke, that would be funny.

• by naikrovek on 4/3/25, 3:11 AM

  rsc, rob pike, and bradfitz are three people I could talk to for hours, completely wasting their time, especially about Plan9.

  That OS fascinates me.

  I remember early in my career when an expert I worked with could sit with me and patiently show me how to do something and let me ask questions for however long it took me to understand well enough what to do and how to swim if I fell in the deep end of whatever they wanted me to do. It was some of the fastest upskilling that I have ever done in my career, like getting a bachelors degree worth of very specific knowledge in three hours.

  I don’t know C and I don’t know enough about Plan 9 to use it productively for anything, but it has some extremely cool and useful features that I want to know more about and learn how to use, even if it is only so that I can lament the non-existence of those features in the big three operating systems today.

  If I had the money I would probably pay to get face time with all three of those folks for expanding my Go knowledge and rsc and rob pike for the plan 9 understanding that I have always wanted, but have never been able to give myself.

• by breckinloggins on 4/2/25, 6:54 PM

  God I love plan9. Making my own os using many of its principles is a retirement project life goal.

  EDIt: I reserve the name “chaos10” for this project, since - like SerenityOS - there will be no plan.

• by kanwisher on 4/2/25, 3:56 PM

  wholly cow was not expecting them to patch the plan9 kernel to make this work

• by renhanxue on 4/2/25, 3:49 PM

  > In 1999, Intel introduced the Pentium III processor with SSE instructions.

  I kinda expected this paragraph to continue with

  > This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

• by fultonb on 4/2/25, 5:34 PM

  This is so cool to see. Plan9 was a wonderful part of my COVID isolation, and I miss playing with it. This might have inspired me to spin up a 9front VM this weekend.

• by mcdow on 4/2/25, 3:47 PM

  Rob Pike is in shambles after this devastating betrayal

• by pjmlp on 4/2/25, 8:52 PM

  Great, maybe Inferno as follow up?

• by chaz6 on 4/2/25, 4:32 PM

  Please consider RISC OS next!

• by chrsw on 4/2/25, 5:19 PM

  My employer-controlled browser won't let me access that URL. At first it was cert errors and now it's just blocked.

• by Gualdrapo on 4/2/25, 4:32 PM

  Yet I still wonder how cool things would be if Plan9 was the most popular and used OS

• by gbraad on 4/2/25, 5:47 PM

  I do expect tailscale drive shares to use 9P in that case ;-P

• by stonogo on 4/2/25, 7:41 PM

  Seems like the real story here is that the Plan 9 port of Go is not particularly healthy, and that it's easier to modify an OS kernel than it is to fix Go?

• by facile3232 on 4/2/25, 4:22 PM

  Plan 9 gets tailscale before a browser! Somehow this makes sense