From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <9ba81b9084fd1a7d411bbf1a8e0e286f@hamnavoe.com>
From: Richard Miller <9fans@hamnavoe.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:05:57 +0100
To: 9fans@9fans.net
In-Reply-To: <CANE8QwdoY5sP-1PnGRodR-ghh_M74+m3FwcKSRDkxQAw3QbDNA@mail.gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] Raspberry Pi userland is now open
Topicbox-Message-UUID: c8fda202-ead7-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

In practical terms this doesn't make a lot of difference for Plan 9 as it is now.  Dev/draw makes use
of only a few simple 2d operations for "accelerated" graphics, and the dma engine on the raspberry pi
SoC provides a 2d memory-to-memory mode which should be sufficient to do these on the ARM side.

But if anyone is ambitious enough to do something more high level - Plan 9 movie player? - it should
be useful to be able to see the API used between the linux high level graphics libraries and
the GPU firmware, instead of having to reverse engineer the protocol on the wire.  Now we get
to reverse engineer the linux library source instead.  (In my experience linux software can be
so convoluted that this may not be an improvement, but maybe in this case we'll be lucky.)