On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Strake <strake...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 25/04/2012, John Floren <j...@jfloren.net> wrote: >> There are 3 options: >> >> 1. Suck it up and use the 64-bit system that is available >> 2. Write drivers for your hardware (this is the comedy option) >> 3. Complain on 9fans for a while before eventually giving up (this is >> the popular option) > 4. Keep to Linux and curse the world in wrath. >
I forgot about #4. We almost all end up going with #4 at some point, to a greater or lesser extent. > I'd shut up if no one _asked_ me about it, but some did. You still haven't clarified what exactly you want to do with your 64-bit system, besides win dicksize wars. Reasons for using a 64-bit system include, for example, *needing* more than 4 GB of RAM. If you want to do stuff like Ron and Nemo have done, where you stick your entire filesystem in 64 GB of memory or so, then yeah it's important. On the other hand, I've never had a Plan 9 system with more than 4 GB of RAM, excepting our NIX test box, and everything has been fine--you don't need a lot for this OS! >> I don't even know what you're attempting to imply with that >> calculation at the end, though. What does the onboard graphics card >> have to do with network bandwidth? > > It doesn't; however graphics are drawn, whether in hardware or > software, they must be sent to terminal. > >> If you run a big drawterm/cpu >> window, it won't be that high of a data rate Through the magic of compression, and other things like realizing that you don't have to redraw the *entire* screen 60 times a second when displaying a mostly-static desktop. You just send the chunks that have changed, *when* they change. >> and it won't use the >> graphics card anyway. > > Then it will be slow. Software graphics are slow. > I'm not that familiar with how the Plan 9 graphics system works, but we're not talking about hardware vs software OpenGL. There is no OpenGL to be had here. This is writing bits into a framebuffer and having them appear on the screen. It's pretty damn fast to write things to main memory. john
