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I suspect a lot of eyecandy would be easier to implement on plan9. I have been thinking about openGL on plan9. Has anyone looked at adding openGL to Plan9?
Disclaimer: I work for Intel, in a graphics group tied closely to GPUs. All my words are mine, as are my opinions, and don't represent Intel.
There is no deep technical reason not to add OpenGL to plan9. It is, however, one hell of a big effort if you want hardware acceleration, not easily undertaken by hobbyists. Each hardware device to support requires substantial driver work and compiler work - shader compilers must be targeted to particular GPUs these days.
If I were going the route of enabling 3D graphics on Plan9 I'd probably flat out ditch the OpenGL model. Instead I'd probably treat the GPU as a remote machine, and use 9P to provide namespace in which you could bind textures, vertex buffers, frame buffers, shaders, and so on. A control channel would be used to launch tasks using these named resources. There's minor issues involving virtualization in the absence of sufficient resources, but I'm hoping the days of small graphics cards will be behind us long before I can get around to coding such a driver...
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