Book club time, happy new year.

# Chapter 11

A chapter about threads and channels.

Threads are independent of processes and so they have their own threadID.
I think we call that user-level threads in comparison with the different
types of mapping of kernel-level threads out there, user-level threads
are many-to-one.
I was once wondering about benchmarks, but it seems it's not very
relevant: https://nixers.net/Thread-Benchmarking-Pthread

Quote:One problem with Plan 9 threads is that a blocking operation, such as I/O, blocks the entire process, rather than blocking a single thread. The thread library provides a proccreate(2) routine we can use to create a new thread wrapped in a new process.

I hadn't thought of that but yes.

There is no main when including thread.h, the entry point is threadmain instead.
Interestingly to create thread we pass a stack size.

Channel concept is very interesting, clean. It
reminds me of the same concept I've seen in Rust
https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-exampl...nnels.html.


# Chapter 12

Chapter 12 is about user input/output.
It's pretty linear, going from driver to driver and checking what they do.
They're all files starting with #.

Console is `#c/cons` file.
You can use `#c/kprint` to read what's written to that console.

Then we learn that there are cooked mode terminal and raw ones. Similar to the line on Unix (line at a time).
`/dev/consctl` can be used to switch between raw and cooked mode.
One nice thing is that in cooked mode there's a "hold mode", enabled
with escape, to send multiple lines at once instead of directly.

Plan9 uses unicode, it was the first system to use it. It calls characters
"runes", 16-bit UTF-8.
The alt gr system is similar to the one with libinput/X11.

Mouse input driver is in #m and shows in a virtual file the mouse events /dev/mouse.

Video driver is in #v, aux/vga and /dev/vgactl can be used to control
the vga driver.
On that the display and screen globals in the code makes the programming
a bit weird.

Finally, controlling windows with files is pretty fun.