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
