A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster
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So I went out to make my own cluster and realized that no, sadly, the author simply did not activate nor configure the other machines at all.
I still love plan 9 and still use it on the occasion, but I'd love more detail on how to actually set up a plan9 cluster and really 'get into' the power of distributed computing.
As for me this keyboard doesn't seem futuristic at all. It reminds me of the first computer I experienced in my life.[1]
I mean, it is lovely keyboard, I really like it. Just "futuristic" is a strange way to describe it. It would be even more nice, if some keys of bright colors were added. Like in MK-61[2]. Though photo in wikipedia doesn't capture it (or maybe my memory is wrong), but those blue key was of a so beautiful shade, I really loved it in my childhood and was eager to learn how to use MK-61 just for a joy of using this very key. Yellow and red keys were also likeable but not so much, moreover the function of red key was trivial and I lost interest to it very quickly. But the blue key was beautiful and mysterious... My first love. Maybe I became a programmer due to color of this key.
Presumably through Vortex'[0] similarity to the Symbolics PN 365407[1][2] keyboard, with its very distinctive design that manages to capture at once both futurism and timelessness.
Disregard the 2020's clunky cherry switch keyboards, acquire the OG Best Keyboard.
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[0] https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/images/products/large_V...
[1] http://xahlee.info/kbd/symbolics_keyboard_pn_365407.html
[2] http://coder.zoomquiet.top/data/20130716102310/index.html
For a cluster, you'll usually have a cwfs/hjfs (persistent storage) server, a faktotum (auth) server, and one or more CPU servers, and possibly a terminal machine.
You can then freely use or connect to CPU servers. As everything is shared, and the GUI is also file-based, everything will feel local.
Not in what concerns graphics rendering performance.
Though when using local ethernet, heavy graphics isn't that bad. I can play doom over local ethernet using drawterm to a cpu server which is actually running the doom processes. Of course blowing up the game screen makes it suffer as doom doesn't use dev draw.
Another thing to realize is that plan 9 graphics are done via dev draw which is a sort of 2d graphics engine that you load text and bitmaps into then issue commands to draw and move them around on screen. So a local dev draw on the terminal only receives draw commands for the loaded resources so there is some caching and heavy lifting done at the terminal end. It's not like vnc or rdp where you are viewing a remote frame buffer.
This is entirely false.
The 9P protocol is asynchronous, can handle up to 16k outstanding requests, supports out-of-order responses, and includes support for arbitrary request cancellation,
The only thing thing that blocks to wait for an R message are blocking syscalls, but that doesn't stop other processes from sending further T messages.
But this is the reason why drawterm or rcpu is not very usable over high latency connections.
The simple draw commands issued by Plan9 applications over /dev/draw by e.g. acme or rio shouldn't be cause for concern.
There is no accelerated graphics here, nor UIs that need it.
Acme and Rio are simple because they should be, not because they couldn't be anything else.
Although, you are correct that UIs have degraded extremely in tandem with the increase in available resources, which is very frustrating.
Plan9 provides no performance issues or technological barriers to doing e.g. ray-tracing or scene previews for graphics work. Even with respect to displaying it in a UI.
An OS architecture that doesn't do DMA for maximum hardware performance just isn't up to the game.
Not only are you confusing native UI stack for OS/HW capabilities, you are also seemingly confusing CPU/GPU workloads.
Nothing at all stops Renderman from running on Plan9, other than Renderman not having native Plan9 support.
Renderman does CPU ray-tracing, as ray-tracing still cannot be done in GPU (and no, RTX has no value in production quality rendering). The only GPU feature of Renderman is a post denoising filter, which will otherwise happily fall back to CPU.
> An OS architecture that doesn't do DMA for maximum hardware performance just isn't up to the game.
DMA has no effect on Renderman.
At this point, based on this history of this thread, I'll have to conclude that you have no idea what you're talking about at all.
But beware, these are cheap Chinese monitors available from alibaba company jwell (cheaper but with bad display) so be prepared for a bad experience with the remote.
On the upside, these monitors have Composite (for use with older computers) and can be powered by 12v (span 9-33v, not tested though)!
Any used PC/NUC/Intel Atom board is much, much faster and some cost around the same.
Again, mainly just for fun and experience.
The Raspberry 4 at 1 Gflops/watt is a better option if you want to power the thing with lead acid batteries as backup power for more than 24 hours.
Also Raspberry 4 can be cooled passively with a smaller heatsink so the total size and weight is less.
An Intel compute stick or beelink mini pcs are also passively cooled and weigh no more.
The Raspberry 4 is peak power efficient: http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.html
Mobile phones don't have a keyboard, you can only consume with them. I produce things.
Those sticks don't have a company with it's own GPU and linux (Raspbian now RaspberryOS) behind them and they cost more per watt for performance I don't need.
However I have 2x NUC with Streacoms passive case: https://streacom.com/products/nc2-fanless-chassis/
The person probably enjoyed doing it, most likely didn’t harm anyone in the process, and possibly learnt some things on the road.
Not everything need to be useful beyond the joy of doing it.
Is there any setup required in software for the actual cluster? It looks like there are 4 Pis all running a Pi Plan 9 image, and they're wired together via ethernet. But where is the software setup to link them all together? Or does this just happen automatically on Plan 9?
For reference https://micro.mu/blog/2019/12/05/building-a-microservices-ne...
Maximum lengths are easy to understand because of voltage drops, interference and impedance over long distances. And of course in the old CSMA/CD days multiple senders couldn't be separated by too large a distance.