Re: [9fans] Bits of Plan 9 I wish were more popular...

["Joel C. Salomon" <joelcsalomon@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 7:13 PM, Steve Simon <steve@quintile.net> wrote:
> So you have the source for the quadrature encoder, and a DAC cannot be thar complex can it? why not email Comedi and ask them for card programming info.

Comedi is an Open Sores project to unify the worlds data acquisition
devices under one driver model.  It's about as good a model as fits
the Linux Way™ of these things, and there's enough sample code
included to make it feasible to bring up a new card fairly quickly.
Rather have Comedi drivers than some random vendor's conceptions of
how to program the device, but it's nothing like a simple write(2) to
/dev/analogout0/channel1.

The only issue is that I can't justify the time needed to write Plan 9
drivers when a usable system already exists.

> Still you could use 9vx to run plan9 on top of this system, that way you could maybe
> migrate the system gradually.

Unless vx32 can run real-time tasks (pretty sure it cannot) that's not
much use.  Almost every bit of my code (all except a very thin command
interface) is living in a loadable kernel module

Don't you want Kalman filters in *your* OS kernel?

> Russ has a version of libthread for windows on his web page.

Do you mean libtask?  That could be helpful too, but the system uses
interrupts so cannot entirely be run as cooperative multithreading.

The discipline of thinking in terms of channels. even if the
implementation has gone a-gley, is proving useful too.

--Joel