Re: [9fans] non-PC hardware

["Lawrence E. Bakst" <ml@iridescent.org>]

Many processor architectures are in the process of being marginalized or becoming niche architectures. With Apple switching to X86 and Intel just about dropping IA64, the IA32 and IA32/EM64T is the main architecture(s) going forward. Despite having just sold off the X-Scale embedded to Marvel, I expect Intel to get back into the embedded game with ultra low power X86 chips. Alpha is gone, Sparc is Sun only, MIPs might survive as an embedded architecture.

The big 3 going forward are X86, ARM, and PPC as someone else mentioned.

There is no doubt that plan9 is both portable and has a good dynamic range, from Bitsy to larger X86 boxes with multiple processors. So I am not depressed at all. Supporting new hardware takes lots of work. I've written more IO drivers in my life than most of you. It's a lot of work.

Personally if I was going to work on a plan9 porting I would focus on three areas.

1. The AppleTV box or the Mac Mini. Both of these are low cost machines. Intel actually has an open source driver for the graphics chip on the Mini, which is rare these days, although it doesn't contain source code to do 3D which is too bad. The AppleTV is dirt cheap and you can attach it to a large LCD TV (which are also getting very cheap, soon $1k for 46") and get a really nice setup. I hope the "community" can get some disclosure on the chips used inside the AppleTV box. It would make a nice plan9 terminal.

Because the new Apple stuff is X86 based, ports shouldn't be too hard, delta chip support.

2. Xen. Rumor has it that Xen will be built in to Apple's next OS, Leopard. Everyone is using Xen. So it would be nice to have great support for Xen in plan9. From what I read recently, it seems like it's almost there, but not merged into sources yet.

3. Q: Is there a EM64T version of plan9? If so which word/ptr size model does it use?

http://www.unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lp64_wp.html

I think all of the Intel chips going forward are going have EM64T. So plan9 should have good support for that. Plus you get 8 more registers with EM64T, which the architecture could really use.

leb


At 9:31 PM +0100 3/27/07, maht wrote:
>I depressed myself my reading
>
>http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Other_hardware/index.html
>
>from the looks of it, other than x86 there's nothing modern (i.e. 1Ghz+)
>that runs plan9
>
>do I have this right ?
>--
>  matt lawless
>  maht0x0r@xsmail.com
>
>--
>http://www.fastmail.fm - A fast, anti-spam email service.