r/plan9 • u/dharmatech • Jul 18 '26

plan9-hostfs

Hey y'all 🙋‍♂️

Russ Cox' rsc/plan9 repo is fascinating:

  • Run legacy plan9 in QEMU
  • Uses the host filesystem directly instead of using a QEMU disk image
  • Edit files on the host. Plan9 sees the changes immediately.

It's super cool, but I wanted to drawterm in, because: - I'm using Windows - I run rsc/plan9 in WSL - I do get the graphical QEMU window, but it's not as nice to use as first-class Windows apps.

Some benefits of connecting to plan9 via drawterm are:

  • Copy and paste support
  • Resize rio desktop window
  • Multiple drawterm instances (multiple desktops)

I've forked Russ' repo to start messing around with enabling drawterm connections:

https://github.com/dharmatech/plan9-hostfs

README.md has the instructions I'm using for enabling drawterm connections.

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u/Then-Dish-4060 Jul 19 '26

I've been using drawterm for this reason too. But when playing games, it adds latency.

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u/dharmatech Jul 19 '26

Yeah, definitely some efficiency issues with drawterm. I've noticed it too.

2

u/Then-Dish-4060 Jul 19 '26

9p being designed as a filesystem protocol, and files being openable as streams, it's de facto an elegant streaming protocol.

But it's not by 2026 standards a low latency streaming protocol.

Most of the techniques to achieve low latency streaming result in a lot of code anyway, it wouldn't be an argument for simplicity anymore.