iwp9 2026

An annotated digest of the 12th International Workshop on Plan 9, held in May of 2026, in the wilderness of a small island off the coast of British Columbia.

Audio and music production on Plan 9
May 07, 2026 (Konstantinn Bonnet)
A person delivers the first talk of the workshop. This talk competently describes the topic space, discusses the relevant software present in the 9front System, contextualizes that software in terms of similar or popular alternatives found on other systems, and discusses the differences and deficiencies in them. All of the relevant programs are fully cited and the presenter clearly expresses the information. I presume the presenter has been banned from attending future workshops.

Investigating Performance Bottlenecks in the Plan 9 SPI Driver
May 07, 2026 (Nicholas Ingravallo)
Some academics in Philly emulate a legendary computer using a piece of shit, instead of just driving down to Aberdeen and asking to use the original. In accordance with Raspberry Pi tradition, the primary purpose of the effort is making some LEDs blink.

What are we securing?
May 07, 2026 (Ori Bernstein, Jacob Moody)
Some 9fronts ask the central unanswerable question of Plan 9 development: what the fuck is going on? The presentation, delivered by one of its progenitors, lists many horrible security flaws, enumerates other areas which may contain more, and speculates on possibilities for improving anything. The question asked in the title is not answered, perfectly setting the stage for next year's talks.

Goken: The Plan 9 Toolchain Reborn
May 07, 2026 (Yoann Padioleau)
Armed with the traditional 9fans toolchain, a large language model realizes one of the moon-shot 9fans strategic goals: running something that looks like but is not Plan 9 inside Docker inside a virtual machine inside a MacO's installation. The presenter is immediately ennobled in the annals of 9legacy heraldry.

Pfs: A Caching Proxy for High Latency 9p Links
May 07, 2026 (Revan Edfrey)
A 9fan decides to tackle one of the most notoriously difficult problems in computer science by ignoring it entirely. When challenged with the most common historical objections to the approaches described in the talk, the presenter invokes a previously unexplored defense, centered around the core argument "nuh-uh" and on occasion restoring the focus on the presented work by reminding the audience that the presenter hasn't heard of whatever nerd shit you're on about and it probably doesn't matter.

Rich Text, Markdown Preview, and External Syntax Coloring in Edwood
May 07, 2026 (Paul Lalonde)
A fervent sloptimist greatly improves an Acme-like text editor in the usual fashion: making it less like Acme. While Acme is a garbage text editor, adding garbage features to it is at least thematically appropriate, and abdicating the thought process itself to a digital slot machine in the pursuit of software that reduces the amount of thought required to read other code is refreshingly consistant from a philosophical perspective. The presentation is accompanied by a series of loosely-connected justifications of tithing to Anthropic.

p9wl: A 9P wayland compositor
May 08, 2026 (Maksym Radziwill)
Another 9fan traditionalist asks The Question ("how do I use Facebook on Plan 9?"), and, being an academic, decides to construct the answer from first principles. To quote respected television personality Carl Sagan, "If you wish to update your ORCiD, you must first invent phase correlation, and you must make everyone watch you do it." The entire field of video compression is painstakingly reconstructed in real time.

Sdb: General-purpose Simple Database
May 08, 2026 (Revan Edfrey)
The "whatever, nerd" approach to filesystem caching having proved a riotous success, the same methodology is now applied to databases. The presenter declares ill feelings for structured query language, and proceeds to reimplement approximately a tenth of it, often even using the same terminology. Fortunately, we're able to disregard the other nine tenths since the only supported data type is 'string' and the database is a linked list.

Principia Softwarica: Plan 9 Code Explained
May 08, 2026 (Yoann Padioleau)
A 9fan ports Plan 9 to CWEB. It takes too long, so the slop machine is handling it. Plan 9 is selected because it fits better into the available memory of the GPU the slop machine runs on. The presenter acknowledges not having read most of the results. This is a teaching aid.

Plan 9: The Infinity Notebook
May 08, 2026 (Anand Tamariya)
Someone plays some Youtube videos.

To Be Determined File System
May 08, 2026 (Andrew D. Gibson)
A 9fan decides there should be a filesystem that meets certain needs and has specific features available elsewhere. The presenter explains the motivations behind the work, describes how decisions were made, and connects the goals to the implementations that achieve them. In order to avoid being physically ejected from the 9fans mailing list, the presenter adheres to the oldest custom of 9fans: not releasing the code.

A Non-Traditional Port for RISC-V
May 08, 2026 (Ron Minnich)
A 9fan has fun with a hobby computer. It's not clear which parts are factual and which parts are hallucinated, since many computer specifications are inaccurately reported, and the presenter says things like "ChatGPT explained the situation to me," but that's not the point. The point is someone is having fun, which is the most work we'll ever get out of RISC-V.