tl;dr: qemu runs well on powerful recent-ish android phones. i can see some issues to running plan 9, but nothing entirely insurmountable.
given a powerful phone and a suitable android drawterm, you could use qemu. qemu ran very well on my samsung galaxy a34 with no kvm. (possibly a34e, have sold phone & don't remember). its 100% cpu usage hardly made a difference to battery life. with that phone, wifi troubles drained the battery fast, heavily graphical games weren't bad, and heavy cpu use was basically nothing although the cpu was plenty fast enough for dos in qemu. i think plan 9 should be plenty fast too, and doesn't have the busywait issue (100% cpu use) of many dos programs. i used qemu 2.9 because it's faster and more compatible (but less secure) than newer qemu versions. plan 9 is regularly run in more up-to-date versions of qemu so you may want to use it. termux has packages for up to date qemu, and i was able to compile qemu 2.9 (with python 2.7) easily; either way should be no trouble. there is also an app, limbo qemu, though i wasn't able to get it to read disk images. some permission issue, i think. speaking of android being difficult, i used the f-droid version of termux but i don't know if that'll be practical from september. i think it will, but the initial installation of termux or limbo qemu could be difficult. i'm not sure though; details here, albeit with floss paranoia: https://keepandroidopen.org/ there's a version of termux on the google play store, but it's buggy and less capable. to make phone calls, adjust the brightness and other things, the best option is if android drawterm can do those things. otherwise, the google play version of termux can't do them. the f-droid version can, but you'll need some way to launch shell commands from qemu. arbitrary termination will be an issue under android, though it may depend what other apps you use and how much memory they use. my experience of cwfs at least is that it doesn't take arbitrary termination well. you have the dump, but files in the cache can get corrupted and the corruption dumped. also, arbitrary termination may prevent automatic dumps. keeping the plan 9 root tree in the host fs, as is done by `rsc/plan9` mentioned in Eduardo Cavazos's 'plan9-hostfs' email, should prevent such corruption if i'm not mistaken. however, if the host fs is any variety of fat, keeping plan 9's many small files in the large clusters of fat filesystems bloats storage requirements. i suggest experimentation: in termux, make a small but non-empty file on the fs you intend to put the plan 9 tree, and run du <filename> to see what the block size is. to give a worst-case scenario, my 2TB exfat has 512KB clusters and an old 9front tree uses 59 times the space the files themselves actually need. this is probably worse than you'll see on any phone. on the worst-case 2TB exfat: /data/vm/9/plan9front $ du -h | tail -1 9.0G . /data/vm/9/plan9front $ du -bh | tail -1 153M . /data/vm/9/plan9front $ ls -a . 386 68020 adm arm lib power rc sparc64 sys .. 68000 acme amd64 arm64 mips power64 sparc spim storage wear shouldn't be an issue if you run tmpfs and avoid compulsive saving in your text editor. i don't think plan 9 automatically writes many if any files outside /tmp . On Sat, Mar 21, 2026, at 5:49 AM, adventures in9 wrote: > With current phones, there really isn't a reason to not run off the > local storage for most tasks. The PinePhone has a quad core Arm at a > bit over 1Ghz, 2 to 3 GB of ram, 16GB of emmc and an sd card slot. > The only real issue is using a file system that doesn't abuse the > flash storage. > > On Fri, Mar 20, 2026 at 10:20 PM Bruce Ellis <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> The Pine Phone appears a good candidate, particularly if the Linux code is >> available. >> >> I got out our phone for something to do. Powered it up and there was a clock >> app on a simple window system on Inferno on Plan9. That was the proof of >> concept. >> >> The proof of futility was the Linux port which ungracefully crashed after >> loading two Web pages. >> >> brucee >> >> On Sat, 21 Mar 2026, 12:07 pm David Forshaw via 9fans, <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> I wasn't thinking of using it as a local system, but connected, when >>> required/available given internet connections, to run directly into a home >>> built system. With all available apps held on the home servers, along with >>> any better CPU 's available. >>> >>> My current experience of using drawterm, or even a base install of 9 is >>> that it is very responsive, and light weight for a phone processor, so why >>> not use it over the internet? >>> >>> I am sure my lack of experience, and expertise is adding a silver lining to >>> my thinking. I am also aware that at this current moment in time there are >>> not a deluge of applications running on the base system of 9. >>> >>> With drawterm available on android, 'proper' apps on 9, would seem local to >>> the phone/tablet? >>> >>> When they are written of course.. >>> >>> On Fri, 20 Mar 2026, 01:48 adventures in9, <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>> I wouldn't go with running a remote file server with Plan9 on a phone. >>>> Especially since a phone has so many very particular pieces of >>>> hardware you would need drivers for. >>>> >>>> For adding external services, I would look into something like >>>> Inferno's registry(4). That, and the "lapfs" concept, to have the >>>> phone's local filesystem sync to a home file server or cloud storage. >>>> >>>> On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 10:01 AM Bruce Ellis <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> > >>>> > That's not true. Consider the iPaq port. >>>> > >>>> > brucee >>>> > >>>> > On Wed, 18 Mar 2026, 1:21 am hiro via 9fans, <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >> >>>> >> we generally expect the reliability of an always-on ethernet connection. >>>> >> >>>> >> you'd have to change a lot of basic assumptions in the OS to make it >>>> >> distributed but with unstable mobile (or usb based) links >>>> >> >>>> >> On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 11:10 AM davidaforshaw via 9fans >>>> >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>> >>>> >>> Dipping toes into 9, so please forgive my ignorance. >>>> >>> Given the current state of android, windows, etc, as phone OS's. >>>> >>> >>>> >>> I recognise 9, is very legacy orientated currently, with minimal apps. >>>> >>> >>>> >>> But, is there potential for it, as a distributed OS for tablet devices >>>> >>> such as phones, with light weight processors connected to home based >>>> >>> grids for computing performance. >>>> >>> >>>> >>> As the phone, facilities can basically be separated from the, >>>> >>> computing ones via hardware separation? >>>> >>> >>>> >>> I suspect, this may have been suggested before, so if you could point >>>> >>> me to appropriate documents I would appreciate it. >>>> >>> >>>> > 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options >>>> > Permalink >> >> 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T48b5bda65b616fb8-M316f1e29e0977df2298257be Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
