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

[Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

>
> 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

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFHNj6VpJeHo/Fbu1wRAlNDAJwIQkQ2ySgUak8gqciLKHplZV88LQCfYUAf
Kq1ZGLllXlN5fADssVJdKAc=
=mtgh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----