That is very interesting to hear. Given the need to retrofit X11 with various mechanisms for fast local access to framebuffer or graphics accelerator, I have n

That is very interesting to hear. Given the need to retrofit X11 with various mechanisms for fast local access to framebuffer or graphics accelerator, I have never been convinced that the 8 1/2 and Rio window systems, in which all drawing happened through streams of bytes, were complete and future-ready graphics systems. I wonder if the "everything is a file" principle is actually Plan 9's weakness, a simplistic oversimplification of the nature of OS resources. What if we keep Plan 9's structure/topology (private namespaces, network transparency where possible) but redesign the fundamental file abstraction. Maybe this needs to happen at the level of a new instruction set which provides primitive data block transfer operations which can be implemented efficiently e.g. by memory mapping or dma on local hardware and which automatically fallback to streaming in the network case. Not new silicon but a fast virtual machine which provides network transparency and high performance where possible.