Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Glendix project.
As someone already pointed out Glendix tries to bring binaries over to make Linux feel more Plan9-ish. Unfortunately, I no longer have the luxury of being a grad student and so my time these days is very limited and have had to move on to other things. But if there's someone motivated enough to push Glendix further, I'd be more than happy to help!
As for the question of 'Why Plan 9', to put it simply - reading the source code makes me feel like a hacker again. A long time ago if you didn't understand how something worked, you could just peek at the source and everything would be clear. Plan 9 maintains that, the source code /is/ the documentation. Alas, I wish I could say the same of 'modern' free/open source software (Linux/BSD/GNU/what have you).
Porting one of the fine Plan 9 based filesystems to Linux seems like an excellent operating systems project. This would directly benefit Glendix as many applications require these synthetic filesystems provided by the Plan 9 kernel.
/net is a good example of how sockets are done away with, and /dev/draw provides a useful graphics API. You could argue in your project thesis that filesystems sometime provide a better abstraction than traditional programming-language based APIs; and prove it by porting one such filesystem over to Linux.
Unfortunately, I've already done my senior project. Though, I'd be happy to
hack on Glendix stuff in my free time.
/net
I've not done any network or kernel programming, and I'm only slightly
familiar with /net. If I wanted to hack on this, where would you
recommend I start?
It seems like a Glendix /net could be implemented in user space. Yes?
As someone already pointed out Glendix tries to bring binaries over to make Linux feel more Plan9-ish. Unfortunately, I no longer have the luxury of being a grad student and so my time these days is very limited and have had to move on to other things. But if there's someone motivated enough to push Glendix further, I'd be more than happy to help!
As for the question of 'Why Plan 9', to put it simply - reading the source code makes me feel like a hacker again. A long time ago if you didn't understand how something worked, you could just peek at the source and everything would be clear. Plan 9 maintains that, the source code /is/ the documentation. Alas, I wish I could say the same of 'modern' free/open source software (Linux/BSD/GNU/what have you).