9P Specification, Papers, and Other Documents
Plan 9 from Bell Labs - Manual Section 5 - Plan 9 File Protocol, 9P: This is the most authoritative ‘specification’ of the 9P protocol. The intro(5) page is a good place to start reading about 9P. See also the equivalent Inferno Manual Section 5 and its corresponding intro(5).
There are various papers that cover the design of 9P file system interfaces and explain some of the usual (an unusual) usages of 9P in distributed and other environments:
- The Ubiquitous File Server in Plan 9 by C. H. Forsyth
- The Styx Architecture for Distributed Systems by Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie.
- The Organization of Networks in Plan 9 - Connecting the pieces. The details in the paper are outdated but the ideas still apply.