Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

Posted by adriangrigore 4/2/2025

Porting Tailscale to Plan 9(tailscale.com)

371 points | 92 commentspage 2

renhanxue 4/2/2025|

> 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.

o11c 4/2/2025|

Better than MMX at least.

fultonb 4/2/2025||

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.

bradfitz 4/2/2025||

Note that the 9front patches to run Tailscale are still in progress. I was just told they'll be ready in a couple weeks.

For now only 9legacy (with all the latest changes) works.

MisterTea 4/2/2025||

> This might have inspired me to spin up a 9front VM this weekend.

Please do! Just be careful with your sysupdate.

mcdow 4/2/2025||

Rob Pike is in shambles after this devastating betrayal

rsc 4/2/2025||

Not sure what the betrayal is? He contributed a quote for yesterday's post. https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-enterprise-plan-9-suppo...

bakul 4/2/2025||

from the above post:

  > April 1, 1999
  >
  > FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Forward to the past?

pests 4/2/2025||

This was explained in the post. 1999 was when Intel released the Pentium 3 with SSE instructions, which caused the first major issue that had to overcome.

pvg 4/2/2025||

I'm sure it takes more than that to shamble an Olympic Silver Medal winner in archery.

tiffanyh 4/2/2025||

Isn't that a joke.

He didn't actually go to the olympics.

https://wiki.c2.com/?RobPike

pvg 4/2/2025||

It is pretty clear that neither you nor these 'c2' characters have lettered in anything, including the Olympics.

pjmlp 4/2/2025||

Great, maybe Inferno as follow up?

chaz6 4/2/2025||

Please consider RISC OS next!

fidotron 4/2/2025|

Three button mouse dependent UI solidarity!

Golang on RISC OS would be a truly ludicrous porting effort.

chrsw 4/2/2025||

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

neckro23 4/2/2025||

IME some web security gateways block the Tailscale domains entirely, presumably because it's a VPN that can bypass said gateway.

bradfitz 4/2/2025||

Weird. It's just Vercel on AWS. We have no alerts firing about any probers having cert errors or anything.

I wonder what your employer/policy doesn't like.

jen20 4/2/2025||

I've found that tailscale.com sometimes gets blocked by overzealous content filters as "VPN software".

Gualdrapo 4/2/2025||

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

gbraad 4/2/2025||

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

bradfitz 4/2/2025|

Indeed. We ran out of time :)

stonogo 4/2/2025|

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?

bradfitz 4/2/2025|

The Plan 9 port of Go _was_ not particularly healthy. It is now.

Fixing Go to not special case Plan 9 benefits all platforms--- all operating systems use the same code paths now, making the code simpler.

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