From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] X on Plan 9
In-Reply-To: <20010418225620.CE096199C0@mail.cse.psu.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0104181912000.15153-100000@weyl.math.psu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 19:41:42 -0400
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8521e074-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025



On Wed, 18 Apr 2001 anothy@cosym.net wrote:

> if nobody has any info, i'm going to give it a shot myself,
> but X is an intimidating (read: freakin' huge!) body of
> crap^Wcode, and i'd rather not duplicate work someone else's
> already done.

Going the other way round might be interesting - X client running on
UNIX box and acting as 9P server. I.e. exporting an equivalent of
/dev/cons, /dev/consctl, vga(3), mouse(3) and draw(3). For one thing,
it gives convenient way of dealing with boxen that have unsupported
video cards, for another - helps with debugging support for such cards
(boot, import that animal from a UNIX box, union-mount it in the beginning
of /dev and let rio run as usual; then you can create a new namespace
group, mount #v and #i there and do whatever testing you want - stuff
in that group will talk to real hardware).

Had anyone done that? I will play with that if/when I'll get some
spare time - I've got a box with unsupported card and a bunch of UNIX
boxen on the same (moderately loaded) ethernet segment, so unless there's
a better way to do that...