Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
The simple, everything is a file, model of Plan9 is what makes the namespaces API as clear and as general as it is. All the objects export the same file API. Every interaction with the OS objects is done through file open, create, read, write, etc. But it has it&#x27;s drawbacks.<p>First, it&#x27;s not always easy to map every object operation into either an open read or write. With time, we should have seen a lot of ugly interfaces resulting from this limitation.<p>Second, hardware progress, the web, etc., introduced a lot of heterogeneity and complexity. People could no more keep up with simple general designs. And to squeeze every bit of performance, everyone was doing things different based on the hardware and the workloads. They use whatever makes their software, drivers, and OS objects work as fast as they could.<p>And this is how we ended with the extreme fragmentation and heterogeneity we have in Linux, which explains the complex and less general implementation of its namespaces and its other features.<p>Edit: fix typos