On Mar 4, 2010, at 4:13 PM, ron minnich wrote:

The big thing I'd like to see as a GSOC project, and which I think is
doable, is a first-class set of drivers for the beagle and/or IGEP.

The beagle is cheap and would be a very nice terminal.

It's close on some fronts. We really need video. USB is not there yet.
There are other problems. At the same time, Geoff has done a great job
of giving us a foundation from which we can work.

Thats the thing, drivers are the most needed. Fancy programs won't do you any good if Plan 9 won't even run on your machine.

It's interesting but watching the way things are going, ARM-based
designs are really taking off. I just visited a vendor who told me
they're churning out just one type of CPU at 1M a month and they're
growing.

That's great news. Personally I wish it was the MIPS, but it'll do.

I think the opportunities for doing good Plan 9 work on ARM are going
to grow quite a bit. It may well prove a better platform for the
future than PCs, which are increasingly closed and esoteric.

I think a broken table would make a better platform than a PC, and it seems to be getting worse.

It might be worth it to devote a little more effort into non-80x86 platforms. Windows dominates it and won't be moving any time soon, OS X runs strictly on it, and the GCC is focused almost entirely on it, Heck most everything run on it.

It certainly seems like there is a slight renewed interest in RISC machines. Most everyone I know has a laptop, and with the 80x86's horrid power needs...

Leaning a little towards another platform could turn out to be a good idea.

But I think the drivers would not be too hard, I've looked at (e.g.)
the U-boot video driver and think it could go into Plan 9 without too
much trouble. I don't see this as a super-hard project and it would
provide us with a nice platform.

ron





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