Dreamcast Could Pick Up Inferno And Plan 9

woggo writes: "I just got the Vita Nuova newsletter for February. It appears that they are planning a port of Plan 9 and Inferno (the recently open-sourced operating systems from Bell Labs) to the Hitachi SH3 and SH4. I quote: "It would be good to hear from readers that have a suitable board to target for a reference port. Failing that, we have got our own ideas!)" Guess it's time to vote for everyone's favorite $99 MIPS computer...." According to the Vita Nuova site, "First, we are working on a port of the compiler suite to generate code for the SH series [of Hitachi chips]. Once that is done, we can start on an Inferno port (it being easier to port Inferno than Plan 9)." Update: 02/07 04:15 PM by T : Mitch Davis of the Linux on SuperH team wrote:"[this] article called the DreamCast "everyone's favorite $99 MIPS computer". Just so you know, the DreamCast is powered by a Hitachi SuperH processor, not a MIPS." Thanks for the correction, Mitch.

Comments

What are SH-3/4's used in?

[CarrotLord]

Seriously, they must have a better business reason to be thinking about porting it to SH-3/4 than old dreamcasts... surely? Who would want Inferno or Plan 9 on a Dreamcast anyway? Surely the esoteric-OS and Dreamcast markets are almost entirely separate? What are they really targetting here?

rr

Re:What are SH-3/4's used in?

[fatphil]

SH3 is fairly common in the embedded telecomms world as a general purpose processor. (Nowhere near the variaous ARMs and Moto processors though, and I'm not talking about the DSP side either - Moto and TI and AD have that side sown up).

FP.
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards

Re:Does anyone know if DreamCast will play CD-R

[BrK]

Yes, it will. I've found that the disc has to be properly finalized in order for it to work reliably.

Kinda neat

[Sc00ter]

The dreamcast would make a wonderful settop box. It's got a keyboard, modem, ethernet.. what more could you want? NFS mount you mp3 drive off your linux box and it's an MP3 player too. NFS mount all your videos and play mpegs on your TV.

I think this is all very cool, once they get a good set top suite going for it it would be worth it. Put in your CD and surf the web, check your email... save all your settings (ip address and whatnot) on the VMU and you're good to go...

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Re:Kinda neat

[Sc00ter]

Yeah, but some peopld don't want a computer in their living room. The DC is already there, it has more then enough power, you don't need a whole other machine.

I'm speaking more in terms of people that already have a DC. If you have one already it's the cost of the ethernet adapter, some cable, and once the sofware to do all this is around just a CD to burn. That's got to be less then the cost of a whole new machine with a TV out card.
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Well DC is turning into..

[vandenh]

Looks like DC is turning into a cheap fun machine. Maybe Sega should think about releasing a DC as a tech-toy for those people who want to do things like this with the machine (with more developer friendly hardware). I am sure a lot of people will find a good use for it. And they can play great games on it too!

This is weak...

[BigumD]

I mean, come on... the DC has no storage medium, and is in no way the "ideal $99 computer". And have you looked at Vita Nuova's site? The OS is far less advanced then Linux (to be fair: it was designed that way), looks rather unintuitive, and currently costs $150 for an Academic license, and $300 for the personal!!

So why, pray tell, would I spend more for a possibly useless OS for a system I bought for $200? Thanks but no thanks...

Re:Dreamcast - the next Amiga?

[karmawarrior]

Erm, Plan9 isn't actually based around WORM storage. It's just that some capabilities of the whole system are done by special servers. No need to keep several gigs of mass storage in every workstation, just a central file server. (Or SMP workstations, just us a cpu server, etc.)

Agreed.

The Amiga-comparison is a little bit shaky, as it never was meant for networks, which is the prime concept of Plan9 ("Build a Unix out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little Unixes").

Actually, the original Amiga (in this instance, compare with the "Dreamcast" part of the proposal) was intended as a games console, and the basis for AmigaOS, Tripos, (compare with the Inferno/Plan 9 part of the proposal) was originally developed as a network distributed operating system. Which is partially why AmigaOS is so IPC based, with files read by sending packets to handlers that send packets to device drivers which, ok, is all hidden from you because you'd use dos.library anyway to hide the details of what was going on underneath.

Most users never got to saw AmigaOS as a network based operating system because Amiga didn't include any networking hardware until late in the day and left the networking side of the operating system out of AmigaOS.

I'd see the Dreamcast with a kick-arse OS, be it Plan 9 or Inferno, neither of which I've delved into beyond the documentation so can't comment too much on, or AROS, Be, Athena, etc, as being a potentially hot, nice to program, cheap multimedia console. There's no such thing on the market at the moment. It'd be wonderful to see one come out.
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Keep attacking good things as "communist"

wtf?

[The_Messenger]

I am a huge fan of Plan 9, and I'm sure I'll be modded down for saying this, but... what is the fucking point of this? Dreamcast users have no need for Plan 9, and Plan 9 users in need of a cheap NC can do much better. By the way -- just because Plan 9 will run on those two CPUs doesn't mean it will run on the Dreamcast... you're forgetting about the graphics chipset, et cetera. Plan 9 doesn't have very stellar or far-reaching support on any architecture right now. IMNSHO, the developers should spend more time enhancing Plan 9's hardware support on SPARC and x86 platforms instead of porting to others. (Before it turns into another NetBSD, ie "runs on everything imaginable, but no one gives a shit".)

Porting your favorite niche OS to a toaster may be a fun way to spend a few weekends, but is it really valid material for a "news" site visted by millions of Windows users and dozens of Linux-wannabes every day?

I know I shouldn't expect any better, and I should just stop visiting the site if all I'm going to do is bitch, but wtf is up with Slashdot lately? Most of the front-page stories in the past month would have only ranked as "Quickie" material a year ago. I don't believe that there's a lack of non-trivial news. So what's the deal? Are you guys depressed over your worthless VA stock? Do you miss Hemos, since he left for the UK to become a FreeBSD user? Or are busy writing a version of Slash that actually works?

Re:wtf?

[slim]

I have never tried Plan9, but I read a white paper on it a while ago. Isn't one of the innovations of the OS that you can transparently run processes on remote machines over the network, regardless of architecture? Sort of like a remote X client, but neater?

In which case, a headless Dreamcast on the network would be a prefectly acceptable workhorse for a few of your processes...
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Not a MIPS!

[mitch_davis]

The DreamCast is powered by a Hitachi SuperH processor, not a MIPS.

Mitch.
(For the Linux on SuperH team)

Perfect Theme Song

[bumperson]

Burn, baby, burn
Dreamcast Inferno
Burn, baby, burn

dream on buddy...

[Pengo]

Hm... PS2 pushes 6.2 GFLOPS and a Memory Bus Bandwidth of 3.2 GB per second kicks the living crap out of any x86 intel based PC on the planet.

These little boxes pack a hell-of-a lot of punch man... not only that they put it where it counts...


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the ideal set-top box is not the dreamcast

[SethJohnson]

The dreamcast lacks the competitive features in this arena. Sure, it's got an artificially-low price of $99, which is like the iOpener- sold at a loss with the goal of making money off licensing fees (subscription fees in the case of iOpener). But it doesn't have the hardware, support for hardware, or features that products like Tivo have. Tivo is poised to really dominate the set-top box arena. It should be trivial for the company to add a web browsing interface, keyboard, mouse, etc. Just like the iOpener, if Sega found that a substantial number of people were buying the dreamcast to convert it to some use that doesn't net them licensing fees from game makers, then they'll quickly squelch that little party.

The other compelling aspect of the tivo is that it's running on x86 linux. Porting games and apps should be a breeze once tivo offers an api for the interface. This is an advantage tivo has over web tv. In order to get games and other apps on webTV, microsoft is going to have to start from a standstill in convincing developers to work on the platform. "But Bill, we've already got our coders working on the WinCE, PocketPC, X-box, Win2k versions of SuperBlammo Invaders. Now we've got to also get this thing to deploy on webTV? Ok, if you promise this is the next big thing..."

Seth

Re:Dreamcast - the next Amiga?

[British]

The Amiga had the CD32 unit which had games and I think a few educational apps. Needless to say, it flopped, but was a pretty cool system. Think of the Atari XE gaming system.

Cheap X-terminal + game console

[deno]

I do not really care about Plan 9 (then again, why not), but a cheap game console with integrated network card, which could also be used as an X-terminal would have my full attention.

Even an console which would just offer me ssh-shell would be interesting, since most of the time I just use pine. X would be better though.