[9fans] A sad story and a question

[9fans] A sad story and a question

[Pietro Gagliardi]

Hello. I performed

	term% /usr/glenda/bin/rc/pull

today and I noticed some new updates to files for commands. So I did

	term% cd /sys/src/cmd
	term% mk all

and waited (primarily for GhostScript). At the end there were errors.  
So I went back and tried to see if

	term% cd ..
	term% mk clean

would fix it. Nope - it reset my date, among others. So now I'm going  
to reinstall Plan 9. Oh, and when I tried to back up my files to my  
FTP server, it wiped some of the files (a important one was updated  
on my Mac OS X system, though, and two were not touched, so  
everything is good now). :-( So now I'm going back to reinstall Plan  
9 and ask this question:

If an update is retrieved with glenda's pull, do you then perform an  
mk all on the new sources?

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[geoff]

No, matching binaries will be built the night following the 
source changes, and those binaries will be installed on
sources (except for kernels and 9load).  So just pulling
periodically will keep you current.

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Pietro Gagliardi]

So I just ruined my system. Oh well, these things happen :-) I did  
manage to back up the most important parts (my colors library is in / 
n/sources/contrib/pietro; I also have some shell scripts such as  
setupnet, which sets up the network, /n/sources, etc. which were put  
on my FTP server).

On Nov 9, 2007, at 9:49 PM, geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:

> No, matching binaries will be built the night following the
> source changes, and those binaries will be installed on
> sources (except for kernels and 9load).  So just pulling
> periodically will keep you current.

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[ron minnich]

On 11/9/07, Pietro Gagliardi <pietro10@mac.com> wrote:
> So I just ruined my system. Oh well, these things happen :-)

you have a venti? Maybe people here can tell you the easy way to back
up to an older score -- like pre-ruin.

Nothing's ever really "gone" on plan 9.

ron

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Pietro Gagliardi]

I don't have sufficient hard disk space for Venti. I don't even have  
sufficient hard disk space to back up my Mac :-)

On Nov 9, 2007, at 11:50 PM, ron minnich wrote:

> On 11/9/07, Pietro Gagliardi <pietro10@mac.com> wrote:
>> So I just ruined my system. Oh well, these things happen :-)
>
> you have a venti? Maybe people here can tell you the easy way to back
> up to an older score -- like pre-ruin.
>
> Nothing's ever really "gone" on plan 9.
>
> ron

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[erik quanstrom]

get a bigger hard drive.  160g hard drives can be had for $45.
there was a time when 100gb was considered "infinite" storage.

- erik

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[ron minnich]

On 11/9/07, Pietro Gagliardi <pietro10@mac.com> wrote:
> I don't have sufficient hard disk space for Venti. I don't even have
> sufficient hard disk space to back up my Mac :-)

If you don't have venti you're missing one of the most important bits of Plan 9.

ron

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[David Leimbach]

On Nov 10, 2007 9:31 AM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/9/07, Pietro Gagliardi <pietro10@mac.com> wrote:
> > I don't have sufficient hard disk space for Venti. I don't even have
> > sufficient hard disk space to back up my Mac :-)
>
> If you don't have venti you're missing one of the most important bits of Plan 9.
>
> ron
>

I've been meaning to set up one with Plan 9 Ports.  I bet it's a
better Time Machine than Time Machine is :-)

Might be "fun" to get a GUI wrapped around it.

Now that Plan 9 Port is working on Leopard (Thanks Russ and everyone
who worked on that!  That was great turnaround time!) all I need/want
to do is get another external hard drive before I begin tinkering.

Dave

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Pietro Gagliardi]

What if Time Machine is implemented around Venti?

On Nov 10, 2007, at 1:58 PM, David Leimbach wrote:

> On Nov 10, 2007 9:31 AM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 11/9/07, Pietro Gagliardi <pietro10@mac.com> wrote:
>>> I don't have sufficient hard disk space for Venti. I don't even have
>>> sufficient hard disk space to back up my Mac :-)
>>
>> If you don't have venti you're missing one of the most important  
>> bits of Plan 9.
>>
>> ron
>>
>
> I've been meaning to set up one with Plan 9 Ports.  I bet it's a
> better Time Machine than Time Machine is :-)
>
> Might be "fun" to get a GUI wrapped around it.
>
> Now that Plan 9 Port is working on Leopard (Thanks Russ and everyone
> who worked on that!  That was great turnaround time!) all I need/want
> to do is get another external hard drive before I begin tinkering.
>
> Dave

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[David Leimbach]

On Nov 10, 2007 11:00 AM, Pietro Gagliardi <pietro10@mac.com> wrote:
> What if Time Machine is implemented around Venti?
>

I suspected initially that it was, and while I've not looked into it,
I tend to think it isn't :-)

Dave

>
> On Nov 10, 2007, at 1:58 PM, David Leimbach wrote:
>
> > On Nov 10, 2007 9:31 AM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On 11/9/07, Pietro Gagliardi <pietro10@mac.com> wrote:
> >>> I don't have sufficient hard disk space for Venti. I don't even have
> >>> sufficient hard disk space to back up my Mac :-)
> >>
> >> If you don't have venti you're missing one of the most important
> >> bits of Plan 9.
> >>
> >> ron
> >>
> >
> > I've been meaning to set up one with Plan 9 Ports.  I bet it's a
> > better Time Machine than Time Machine is :-)
> >
> > Might be "fun" to get a GUI wrapped around it.
> >
> > Now that Plan 9 Port is working on Leopard (Thanks Russ and everyone
> > who worked on that!  That was great turnaround time!) all I need/want
> > to do is get another external hard drive before I begin tinkering.
> >
> > Dave
>
>

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Russ Cox]

> What if Time Machine is implemented around Venti?

It's implemented around ln.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14#time-machine-internals

Russ

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Bakul Shah]

> > If you don't have venti you're missing one of the most important bits of Plan 9.
> >
> 
> I've been meaning to set up one with Plan 9 Ports.  I bet it's a
> better Time Machine than Time Machine is :-)
> 
> Might be "fun" to get a GUI wrapped around it.

I suspect a lot of eyecandy would be easier to implement on
plan9.  I have been thinking about openGL on plan9.  Has
anyone looked at adding openGL to Plan9?

> Now that Plan 9 Port is working on Leopard (Thanks Russ and everyone
> who worked on that!  That was great turnaround time!) all I need/want
> to do is get another external hard drive before I begin tinkering.

I migrated one FreeBSD machine to zfs and so now venti
happens to be running on top of zfs.  Probably bit of
an overkill...

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[andrey mirtchovski]

> I suspect a lot of eyecandy would be easier to implement on
> plan9.  I have been thinking about openGL on plan9.  Has
> anyone looked at adding openGL to Plan9?

the free opengl libraries (mesagl) were ported long time ago without
any of the optimizations. they were never tied to the windowing
environment however. glut was never ported, nor was a replacement for
it ever written.

it is a good exercise in Plan 9 and it's doable within the APE
framework, so not too big of an effort. making it fast though is much
more difficult :(

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[john]

>> I suspect a lot of eyecandy would be easier to implement on
>> plan9.  I have been thinking about openGL on plan9.  Has
>> anyone looked at adding openGL to Plan9?
> 
> the free opengl libraries (mesagl) were ported long time ago without
> any of the optimizations. they were never tied to the windowing
> environment however. glut was never ported, nor was a replacement for
> it ever written.
> 
> it is a good exercise in Plan 9 and it's doable within the APE
> framework, so not too big of an effort. making it fast though is much
> more difficult :(

Perhaps some of the reason nobody is doing much with 3D is that a lot of
people use drawterm all the time, which is less than ideal. I dread to think
of DOOM on drawterm over my connection :)


John

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Paul Lalonde]

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>
> I suspect a lot of eyecandy would be easier to implement on
> plan9.  I have been thinking about openGL on plan9.  Has
> anyone looked at adding openGL to Plan9?

Disclaimer: I work for Intel, in a graphics group tied closely to  
GPUs.  All my words are mine, as are my opinions, and don't represent  
Intel.

There is no deep technical reason not to add OpenGL to plan9.  It is,  
however, one hell of a big effort if you want hardware acceleration,  
not easily undertaken by hobbyists.  Each hardware device to support  
requires substantial driver work and compiler work - shader compilers  
must be targeted to particular GPUs these days.

If I were going the route of enabling 3D graphics on Plan9 I'd  
probably flat out ditch the OpenGL model.  Instead I'd probably treat  
the GPU as a remote machine, and use 9P to provide namespace in which  
you could bind textures, vertex buffers, frame buffers, shaders, and  
so on.  A control channel would be used to launch tasks using these  
named resources.  There's minor issues involving virtualization in  
the absence of sufficient resources, but I'm hoping the days of small  
graphics cards will be behind us long before I can get around to  
coding such a driver...

Paul

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Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Anthony Sorace]

On 11/10/07, Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net> wrote:

// ...I'm hoping the days of small graphics cards will be behind us
// long before I can get around to coding such a driver...

The cheapest ATI card I could find on their website has 128MB of DDR.
The lowest of NVidia's modern line comes with 256MB. Clock speeds are
in the 400Mhz range and go up from there. You can get GPUs past the
Ghz mark and within spitting distance of the GB mark.

I think the days of small graphics cards were behind us a few years ago now.
Anthony

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Paul Lalonde]

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On 10-Nov-07, at 4:27 PM, Anthony Sorace wrote:
> The cheapest ATI card I could find on their website has 128MB of DDR.
> The lowest of NVidia's modern line comes with 256MB. Clock speeds are
> in the 400Mhz range and go up from there. You can get GPUs past the
> Ghz mark and within spitting distance of the GB mark.
>
> I think the days of small graphics cards were behind us a few years  
> ago now.
> Anthony

It must be a matter of expectations - the apps I work with take that  
256MB of ram, eat it for breakfast, and ask for more.  The  
performance implications of round trips over the bus to main memory  
to swap/page are too much for me to put up with.
But then, I'm rendering substantial 3-D environments; for desktop eye- 
candy, it's more than enough.

Paul

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Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Joel C. Salomon]

On Nov 10, 2007 6:28 PM, Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net> wrote:
> If I were going the route of enabling 3D graphics on Plan9 I'd
> probably flat out ditch the OpenGL model.  Instead...

The little I know of OpenGL led me to think that it was also created
to be run over a network, but I have no idea how big a mismatch there
is between the model it assumes and 9P.  I assume you have a better
view of things?

--Joel

Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Paul Lalonde]

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Modern graphics libraries essentially treat the GPU like a remote  
host - even over fast PCIe it's far enough away that when you're  
aiming for 16.6ms frame times you can't afford much bus traffic.   
Instead, the intention is that most of your data is resident in GPU  
memory and only a small fraction of the used data is transfered from  
the host every frame.   9P is probably not ideal, but the advantages  
of being able to refer to resources so easily could be compelling.   
I'd love to be able to mount a tar file of textures and vertex  
buffers and have a cache on the GPU manage those for me.  It's a much  
simpler user model than the current myriad ways of setting up  
different data types.

Paul

On 10-Nov-07, at 5:12 PM, Joel C. Salomon wrote:

> On Nov 10, 2007 6:28 PM, Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net> wrote:
>> If I were going the route of enabling 3D graphics on Plan9 I'd
>> probably flat out ditch the OpenGL model.  Instead...
>
> The little I know of OpenGL led me to think that it was also created
> to be run over a network, but I have no idea how big a mismatch there
> is between the model it assumes and 9P.  I assume you have a better
> view of things?
>
> --Joel

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3d graphics (was Re: [9fans] A sad story and a question

[Bakul Shah]

> Disclaimer: I work for Intel, in a graphics group tied closely to  
> GPUs.  All my words are mine, as are my opinions, and don't represent  
> Intel.
...
>                                            Instead I'd probably treat  
> the GPU as a remote machine, and use 9P to provide namespace in which  
> you could bind textures, vertex buffers, frame buffers, shaders, and  
> so on.  A control channel would be used to launch tasks using these  
> named resources. 

That seems like a lot of fun, but wouldn't it involve doing a
from-scratch design?  Or may be you are talking about a thin
layer that provides access to what a GPU based controller
provides?  Something on the level of DRI/DRM?  I'd be happy
if this can be done for even one graphics card.

May be then an openGL compatible layer can be added on top
for all the existing apps one'd like to port to Plan9.  I
don't foresee anyone doing a rewrite of google earth.