From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <4332C639.8040607@lanl.gov> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 08:56:57 -0600 From: Ronald G Minnich User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (X11/20050317) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Leimbach , Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] ndis-ulator for plan 9 References: <836acde3b92a3051ec317b5281c1d047@terzarima.net> <3e1162e605092207172e74e9cb@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <3e1162e605092207172e74e9cb@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8f31ff0c-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 David Leimbach wrote: > All of this begins to remind me why I normally don't muck around in OS > kernels. It's so really not fun or interesting to deal with the > braindead-ness of hardware. it's not all bad. USB was a trainwreck from day one. But there's infiniban- oh, wait, that's kind of icky too. Well, there's always BlueToot -- oh, wait, I'm told that makes USB look sane. well, still, you still shouldn't give up so easily. Ah, then, maybe chipset work? You could work with the chipsets and -- oh, wait, vendors won't let you see them. Hmm. Well, they're kinda ugly anwyay. Well, there's the busses! Yes, the busses! check out PCI-E, which does ARQ in hardware! Now there's some fun -- oh, no, it's not fun at all, Forgive me, I forgot. And, I am told, it has just as high latency as PCI-X, because of all the extra glop that got added to support ARQ in hardware. Hmm. Well, if you don't want to do hardware, consider the low-level software stuff that vendors are pushing, like EFI and ACPI, they're really pretty nic -- oh, wait, they're awful. ah, hmm. Well! this is interesting. I'm putting my life into stuff that sucks. What am I doing here? I shoulda gone to work for a railroad. If you get mad at something on the railroad, you get to hit it with a spike hammer (I learned this from experience). Although at times I would like to hit a computer with a spike hammer. Spike hammers have a nice heft to them, and would leave a nice round hole in most computers -- metal cases are no problem. Or maybe be a window washer! ".... a window washer me ..." ron