Re: [9fans] TODO lists for Plan 9

[Jack Johnson <knapjack@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 08:05:52 +0200, lucio@proxima.alt.za
<lucio@proxima.alt.za> wrote:
> What I did figure out, is that 2.1 uses EHCI and falls back to OHCI
> for the slower speeds.  It makes it look like OHCI suffices, but then
> the speed is nowhere near as fast as the real thing.  Good enough for
> a suprprising number of products, but one feels a little cheated.  I
> know NetBSD is still developing EHCI but seem to have a working
> version of OHCI (and UHCI, of course).  I don't know where Linux is
> at, or Windows, for that matter.
>
> BTW, the Bluetooth spec (for comparison purposes) is 1200 pages, which
> is not trivial.  Fortunately, that includes details the average
> developers won't need, but it is still a bit much, specially when my
> immediate interest is to drive a USB/Bluetooth device :-(
>
> As for the mini-OS, it is a very vague idea, but it caught my
> imagination.  My foggy image is of a xen-like thing at the core of
> things and the guest OSes knowing how to talk to each other in a 9P
> fashion.  Is that totally absurd?

There's an interesting interview with one of the Apple engineers that
mentions some of his ideas surrounding Rendezvous / zeroconf and the
idea that 10Mbit Ethernet chipsets are cheaper than USB controllers
and easier to program.  Rather than having USB, he thinks it would be
nice to have another Ethernet jack and a mini hub or switch to replace
your USB hub and your keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. autoconfigure on
a network local to your box, speak open protocols, and use a single
cabling system.

In that kind of environment, I could easily see Plan 9 or Inferno as
the embedded OS for a suite of networked devices, and even that might
be overkill.  Though it doesn't help in the short term, I would much
rather see something like a CerfCube (even running WinCE) with all my
USB devices plugged into it and then imported into my Plan 9 system
rather than deal with the local USB chipsets and standards.

Let someone with cash deal with the mess and just end-run the problem.

-Jack