
Ask HN: Has 9p (plan 9 protocol) ever been used seriously? - robobro
The question is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. I&#x27;ve been teaching myself Limbo programming lately and studying the design of Inferno (including with the Plan 9 protocol which inspired many aspects of the OS) but I&#x27;m not really finding many applications that <i>really use</i> the 9P&#x2F;Styx protocol on the internet. It seems like Plan9 never really took off, neither did Inferno.<p>If you know of any serious usage of the 9P protocol or have experience working on it, or any takes on it, it&#x27;d be very educational!
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gnufx
I don't know anything about that usage, but I've seen it mentioned in
connexion with libvirt, and I assume there's a good reason it's maintained in
NFS-Ganesha, though I haven't used it: [https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-
ganesha/wiki/9p](https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/wiki/9p)

9p appears to be used on Tri-Labs HPC systems, which tend to be serious, if
not entirely open:
[https://github.com/chaos/diod](https://github.com/chaos/diod),
[https://github.com/chaos/9nbd;](https://github.com/chaos/9nbd;) I'd seriously
consider what they do if I had free reign building a new HPC system.

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gtirloni
9p is used in KVM's VirtFS

[https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/book_kvm/data/kvm_...](https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/book_kvm/data/kvm_qemu_virtfs.html)

[https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2010/ocw/system/presentati...](https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2010/ocw/system/presentations/597/original/VirtFS_LPC_2010_Final.pdf)

[https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/VirtFS](https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/VirtFS)

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limeblack
Yes I know someone who has a sever farm runnning plan9 and I believe is using
this.

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jeffbr13
I believe it’s used by Docker’s (Moby’s?) DataKit product inside Docker for
Mac/Windows:
[https://github.com/moby/datakit/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/moby/datakit/blob/master/README.md)

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johnny_1010
9p suck over ip.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IL_(network_protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IL_\(network_protocol\))

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ggm
Rob Pike works for Google now. He used to be responsive to reasonable
questions but (from my personal experience as a time-waster) very intolerant
of time wasters.

Charles Forsyth did a lot of limbo work, he is also responsive to well formed,
reasonable questions.

