Hi Jecel
In the "difference between research and engineering department" I think I would
first port a version of Smalltalk to this system.
One of the fun side-projects done in the early part of the Squeak system was
when John Maloney and a Berkeley grad student ported Squeak to "a luggage tag"
-- that is to the Mitsubishi hybrid "computer on a chip" that existed back ca
1997. This was a ARM-like 32 bit microprocessor plus 4MB (or more) memory on a
single die. This plus one ASIC constituted the whole computer.
Mitsubishi did this nice system for mobile use. Motorola bought the rights to
this technology and completely buried it to kill competition.
(We call it the "luggage tag" because they would embed failed chips in Lucite
to make luggage tags!)
Anyway, for fun John and the grad student ported Squeak to this bare chip
(including having to write the BiOS code). It worked fine, and I was able to do
a large scale Etoy demo on it.
Although Squeak was quite small in those days, a number of effective
optimizations had been done at various levels, and so it was quite efficient,
and all plus Etoys fit easily into 4MB.
In the earliest days of the OLPC XO project we made an offer to make Squeak the
entire OS of the XO, etc., but you can imagine the resistance!
Frank on the other hand has very few optimizations -- it is about lines of code
that carry meaning. It is a goal of the project to "separate optimizations from
the meanings" so it would still run with the optimizations turned off but
slower. We have done very little of this so far, and very few optimizations. We
can give live dynamic demos in part because Dan Amelang's Nile graphics system
turned out to be more efficient than we thought with very few optimizations.
I think it could be an valuable project for interested parties to see about how
to organize the separate "optimization spaces" that use the meanings as
references.
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
> From: Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <[email protected]>
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
>Sent: Tuesday, February 7, 2012 9:42 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Raspberry Pi
>
>Reuben Thomas wrote:
>> On 7 February 2012 11:34, Ryan Mitchley wrote:
>> >
>> > I think the limited capabilities would be a great visceral demonstration of
>> > the efficiencies learned during the FONC research.
>> >
>> > I was thinking in terms of replacing the GNU software, using it as a cheap
>> > hardware target... some FONC-based system should blow the GNU stack out of
>> > the water when resources are restricted.
>>
>> Now that's an exciting idea.
>
>People complain about *only* having 256MB (128MB in the A model) but
>that is way more than is needed for SqueakNOS and, I imagine, Frank.
>Certainly the boot time for SqueakNOS would be a second or less on this
>hardware, which should impress a few people when compared to the various
>Linux on the same board.
>
>Fortunately, some information needed to port an OS to the Raspberry Pi
>was released yesterday:
>
>> http://dmkenr5gtnd8f.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BCM2835-ARM-Peripherals.pdf
>
>The GPU stuff is still secret but I don't think the current version of
>Frank would make use of it anyway.
>
>-- Jecel
>
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