A new release of the 9front project is available, which has been developed by the community as an independent fork of the distributed operating system Plan 9 since 2011, separate from Bell Labs. Ready-to-use installation builds have been created for i386, x86_64 architectures and Raspberry Pi 1-4 boards. The project's code is distributed under the open-source Lucent Public License, based on the IBM Public License but without the requirement to publish source code for derivative works.
Among the features of 9front, there is the addition of enhanced security mechanisms, expanded hardware support, improved performance in wireless networks, the addition of new file systems, the implementation of a sound subsystem and audio format encoders/decoders, USB support, the creation of the Mothra web browser, the replacement of the bootloader and initialization system, the use of disk data encryption, Unicode support, a real mode emulator, and support for AMD64 architecture and 64-bit address space.
The new version ensures full support for operation on the MNT Reform laptop, including support for graphics, sound, Ethernet, USB, PCIe, trackball, SD card, and NVMe. Built-in Wi-Fi is not supported on the MNT Reform yet, and it is recommended to use an external wireless adapter instead. New programs have been implemented in the system: bar (to display a panel, for example, to show battery charge, date, and time), ktrans (performs input transliteration), riow (hotkey manager), and doom (the DOOM game).
The core idea of Plan 9 relates to blurring the distinctions between local and remote resources. The system represents a distributed environment based on three basic principles: all resources can be viewed as a hierarchical set of files; there is no difference in accessing local and external resources; each process has its own mutable namespace. The 9P protocol is used to create a unified distributed hierarchy of file resources.
Source: opennet.ru
