jueves, 16 de junio de 2011

Devwsys

Devwsys will be a new program. Its main components will be some libraries from Inferno (libdraw, libmemdraw, libmemlayer and also lib9 and some pieces from other libraries), libixp and a considerable amount of p9p's devdraw code, as well as from the Inferno kernel devices.

The objective of devwsys is simple in its conception: serve a 9p file system similar to that one of rio(4), with the difference that new windows are not created in a rio instance, but in the windowing system of the host (X11). In fact, a devwsys window will be more limited than a rio window, since it will not include any text editing capabilities, they will only be graphical windows (eg. consctl will only be a dummy file, cons will always be on rawon mode).

In the future, it could be convenient to use an alternative server, for example to work with the p9p's devdraw protocol in stdin/out or to replace libixp with something else. In a similar way, although it is not part of this project, it should be possible to use other windowing systems (like OSX, Windows or, if it takes off, Wayland). In order to achieve this goal, devwsys will use the internal message representation of devdraw. 9p messages will be converted into Wsysmsg's and a runmsg function will take care of interpreting this message and perform the relevant (window system agnostic) function calls. If we want to replace libixp we will only need to build the corresponding Wsysmsg from any form the requests take and supply a reply function, and if we want to support other windowing system only the functions used by runmsg will have to be implemented.

Of course, we are not there yet, but are getting a bit closer with every line of code. A very preliminary version of devwsys will be made public at the end of this week, with the basic functionality to create new windows and some support for input events (mouse and cons files), but not drawing yet.

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