From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <b500ae7955c671ed9242a8d5573571b5@acl.lanl.gov>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
From: andrey mirtchovski <andrey@lanl.gov>
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Subject: [9fans] RFC
Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 07:59:27 -0600
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 95876cc6-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

hi,

i'd like to solicit 9fans' opinion on something that came up in
discussions here at lanl recently -- multi-monitor displays and how
plan9 could be modified to harness their power.

the idea is to share the rio desktop between several monitors.  sounds
simple.

the default configuration that comes to mind is a dual-head graphics
card connected to two displays sitting next to each other.  or maybe
three, or four?

or how about being able to connect to several different cpu servers,
each of which has its own display configured in something like our
powerwall [http://www.acl.lanl.gov/plan9/newnetwork/images/pw115.jpg]
and presenting a single (presumably rather large) desktop?

the first that comes to mind as a way of modifying rio is to do
clipping of rectangles based on which monitor they should appear in
and then writing the images to the appropriate file in /dev/draw.
this could be hidden under a single file to which all user programs
write, with rio doing the multiplexing in the background...

what do you think?


andrey