Plan B: boxes for networked resources

Abstract

Nowadays computing environments are made of heterogeneous networked resources, but unlike environments used a decade ago, the current e n vironments are highly dynamic. During a computing session, new resources are likely to appear and some are likely to go o i n e o r t o m o ve to some other place. The operating system is supposed to hide most of the complexity o f such e n vironments and make it easy to write applications using them. However, that is not the case with our current operating systems. Plan B is a new operating system that attempts to allow the applications and their programmers select and use whatever resources are available without forcing them to deal with the problems created by their dynamic distributed and heterogeneous environments. It does so by using constraints along with a new abstraction used to replace the traditional le abstraction.

Traditional Systems Can Work Well for Pervasive Applications. A Case Study: Plan 9 from Bell Labs Becomes Ubiquitous

“…As we will say, we have found some problems that need further work. We are working on fixing them by applying ideas from Plan B [2] to our environment.…”