High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! 9P (or the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol or Styx) is a network protocol developed for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs distributed operating system as the means of connecting the components of a Plan 9 system. Files are key objects in Plan 9. They represent windows, network connections, processes, and almost anything else available in the operating system. Unlike NFS, 9P encourages caching and also serving of synthetic files (e.g. /proc to represent processes).