Re: [9fans] Plan 9/Inferno Birds of a Feather at OSDI: Summary

[Christopher Nielsen <cnielsen@pobox.com>]

I've been working on porting codecs and multimedia in
general. It is mostly just audio, at this point, but I
will probably be starting on video in the near future.

Currently ported:
libogg-1.1.2
libvorbis-1.1.0
flac-1.1.1
bladeenc-0.94.2
faac-1.24
oggenc

I've poked around for a reasonable mp4 library in C
and didn't find one, so I may write a native plan9
version.

When I ripped and encoded my CD collection, I decided
to use FLAC because it's lossless, so my music library
is made up of whole CDs ripped and encoded in FLAC. As
you can imagine, that's very cumbersome. I've been
going through the process of splitting the albums into
tracks, re-encoding them in ogg, and tagging the
files. I have a (currently) rough rc script that does
all of this automagically based on data from a cue
sheet. I intend to add cddb/freedb support and
parallelise it a bit such that you can give it a list
of cpu servers and it will spread the encoding process
across them.

I also have plans for a streaming audio server akin to
icecast or shoutcast. The nice part is it can probably
be easily written as an rc script.

I have quite a few other works-in-progress, but I
don't really feel they're worth mentioning until I
have more code.

On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 11:30:16AM -0600, Eric Van Hensbergen wrote:
> 
> 
> Okay, I'm a really bad person and didn't take any sort of good notes
> on things.  I apologize in advance for omissions and
> misinterpretations.
> 
> There was maybe a dozen or so people that attended the BoF, but we
> were fortunate to have lots of folks who have worked or are actively
> working on Plan 9.
> 
> As far as new stuff, I think the most exciting piece was Ron's
> discussion (and demonstration) of his Xen Plan 9 port.  Overall it
> seems much snappier than vmware and Ron is actively working to get the
> code released.  In addition to the discussion and demo, there was some
> discussion on hypervisors, para-virtualization and why this is a good
> thing for Plan 9.
> 
> I talked a bit about progress with v9fs (Linux support for 9P2000),
> and it seemed like the general consensus that this combined with Russ'
> plan9port applications are a really good thing.
> 
> I also talked a bit about the stuff that I'm doing as part of my
> research - namely looking at using 9P to share resources between
> para-virtualized partitions.
> 
> Ron Minnich talked a bit about 9grid along with talking about the
> status of DOE funding for 64-bit compilers and a 64-bit Opteron port.
> The short summary is there has been a bureaucratic snag with the funds
> - but hopefully it'll be straighted out real soon now and things can
> really get going.
> 
> The general consensus on the 9grid stuff is it really needs someone to
> step up and kinda take ownership of doing some of the logistical
> overhead (setting up accounts, answering setup questions, etc.)
> 
> Geoff told us a bit about 9netics and what they are working on.
> Sounds like he, Brucee, and Skip have found a way to be paid for
> working on Plan 9 stuff.
> 
> As far as core Plan 9 progress goes - there seems to be a steady
> stream of patches and fixes going into the code.  There are mechanisms
> to see what changes are going in on a day to day basis, but there is
> not always a good description of why the changes went in.  I'm going
> to work on trying to come up with some sort of automated digest of the
> changes and post them to the plan9dev mailing list on a weekly basis.
> 
> One of the biggest problem with the code at this point is that it has
> drifted out of sync with the documentation.  If people are looking to
> help out, going over the documentation, man pages, and wiki and
> aligning them with reality would be a great service to the community.
> 
> There was a little discussion on what happens when Lucent shuts off
> the lights.  There seems to be a high level of confidence that all the
> vital pieces have been replicated by enough folks that we could have
> core community services (web, wiki, and more importantly sources) back
> up within a few days.
> 
> We talked a bit about the FOAF/web-of-trust authentication model.  And
> it seemed that folks thought that this was a bad idea.  We really need
> to try using the existing centralized authentication facilities as a
> community.  Let's not create problems that may or may not exist.
> 
> That's about it.  There was some other discussions, but memory is
> fuzzy.  Other folks that were there please feel free to fill in any of
> the details I might have missed or misinterpreted.
> 
>           -eric
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Christopher Nielsen
> "They who can give up essential liberty for temporary
> safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin

-- 
Christopher Nielsen
"They who can give up essential liberty for temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin