Re: [9front] Thoughts on Wayland?

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

> That's what I like about GPUs: they have dedicated memory and you have to upload manually. No synchronization issues, just what you upload is there. It's basically a different machine.

whether you call it upload or synchronization makes no difference in practice.
devdraw also has dedicated memory and you upload images into it
manually. it doesn't only behave as if it was a different machine, but
it is inspired by the difficulties that arose from having to run it on
a dedicated terminal machine.
from the point of view of devdraw and the whole development toolchain
a gpu is a step back, bec. gpus aren't real computers, so the
compilers stop working (i.e. the hardware target differs, just like
the original blit). unlike with other cpu archs it's probably not
worth getting our compilers ported into shaderland.

> With complex applications with hungry code and hungry graphics (many primitive draws) it would be a win-win: the hungry code gets more time on the client, because the client doesn't have to draw primitives, and you still get fancy graphics, because the hungry primitive drawing routines happens on the devdraw server side.

i'm not sure why you care so much. mostly devdraw is a bandwidth
optimization (preloaded textures).
the primitives we have are more than enough to display 2D content
efficiently. what usecase are you unable to implement with the given
technique?

> My current plan for gpufs needs another round trip yet, because it doesn't integrate with devdraw at all. You'd have to kick off the drawing in gpufs, you have to download the resulting image, and load that into devdraw. Over network, it means a loss of performance, but I'm thinking about some kind of coupling, so that some devdraw-images are automatically linked with gpufs image buffers. At least on integrated systems like drawterm that should be possible. Still not perfect, but better than network round-trips.

what are the ratios here? current perceived number of roundtrips for
example graphical interaction, vs. theoretical minimum number of
roundtrips  vs. your optimized -1 roundtrip?