Re: [9front] Thoughts on Wayland?

[Willow Liquorice <willow@howhill.com>]

It sounds like the "shared memory" concept Wayland uses is the tricky 
bit, then, because you can't put the same RAM stick in two different 
machines.

Though, if I'm understanding pipe(3) correctly, it reads like the right 
tool to talk to the compositor.

Thinking about it, I guess the compositor and the in-use graphics 
resources (hardware, software, data) ought to be resident on the same 
physical system: a "GPU server", by analogy with a CPU server, though 
"composition server" is probably a more accurate term.

Thinking about it even more, if *all* graphics resources, in use or not, 
are resident on the GPU server, you don't have to shove huge fonts or 
textures over the network, just the rendered images (or diffs!) and some 
RPCs to a process resident on the GPU server to get it drawing what you 
want.

How on earth that makes a program that uses Pango+Cairo, or something 
like that, play nicely on 9 I have no idea… more shims for client programs?

I suppose every terminal is, in and of itself, a GPU server. Maybe I'm 
overthinking it.

On 04/08/2024 20:59, Eli Cohen wrote:
> actually, drawing fast locally (and GPU stuff especially for
> computation) is definitely a plan 9 concept too and is also being
> worked on separately from wayland, and possibly on linux... so... plan
> 9 is an OS for networks that may include plan 9 machines, linux
> machines, iPhones, etc... it's a "unix made out of a network of
> computers" not a "network made out of unix computers"
> 
> On Sun, Aug 4, 2024 at 12:54 PM Eli Cohen <echoline@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> always better to be a willow that bends than the strongest oak in a storm :)
>>
>> there's a common misconception that plan 9 is an OS for a computer. plan 9 is an OS for a network. drawing fast locally is not a plan 9 concept. plan 9 is a 9P multiplexer. a wayland shim for linux/mac/bsd/etc that renders to draw somewhere else on the network would be good and appreciated and a relevant plan 9 concept and people are working on it... but for a fast local wayland implementation, that's what linux is, and linux can be and is a part of plan 9 which is an OS for a network
>>
>> On Sun, Aug 4, 2024, 12:46 PM Stuart Morrow <morrow.stuart@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> How do you share memory over rcpu?