Re: [9fans] lucio- now: student projects

[Martin C.Atkins <martin@mca-ltd.com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002 10:05:19 GMT Luis Fernandes <elf@ee.ryerson.ca> wrote:
>..
> 
> Sounds like you need xmotd for Plan9. 
> 
> I will add it to the todo list and perhaps propose it as a student
> project.

As a relative newcomer to Plan 9, or to actually running it, anyway,
I have some further suggestions for "student projects". Or perhaps they
already have answers?

1)	What would be the "plan 9-ish" way to utilize 3-D hardware graphics
	support? To make available (something like) OpenGL?
	(Since just about everything has got 3-D support nowadays....)

2)	What would be the "Plan 9-ish" way to do real-time video in a window?
	I believe that most real-time video boards write directly into
	the video adaptor's memory - how would this best be integrated with
	the Plan 9 graphics system?
	However, if the data is coming from the processor, such as playing
	back a DVD, would writing it all through /dev/draw
	be a bottleneck? X has come up with techniques to let the application
	write directly into a window's memory to get reasonable performance in this
	situation - how would Plan 9 address this, hopefully without these
	extra levels of complication?

I know these are not, perhaps, the sorts of problem domains that Plan 9
has been used in, but it seems to me that before Plan 9 has any
hope of becoming a competitor to those "other" systems, these are the
sort of "everyday" things that there must be answers for....
Furthermore one would hope that the "Plan 9 approach" could be extended
nicely to every problem domain.

Any thoughts?

It makes a change from editor wars, anyway :-)!

Martin
-- 
Martin C. Atkins	martin@mca-ltd.com
Mission Critical Applications Ltd, U.K.