On 2/19/02 at 2:25 PM, Charles Steinkuehler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Actually, while I haven't been real involved in the > disucssions here lately, I have been doing a bit of LEAF > oriented work. I've been investigating the Gentoo ebuild > process, and checking out some potential scripting > languages (mainly Forth derivations and Lua). I think I'm > ready to "lower the bar" even more: *NO* glibc, *NO* > shell, and a *VERY SMALL* initial ramdisk that bootstraps > the rest of the distribution. This should all be possible > using a self-contained scripting lanugage that has the > capability to do kernel calls. Very much like e3, which > talks to the kernel directly rather than using a c > library, the bootstrap code can be made very small. By > using tiny interpreted language like Forth, the boot > process can still be made flexible. The key part I'm > still checking into is being able to dynamically extend > the scripting language once the system is booted, enabling > more "normal" functionality, including honoring of local > setting and similar. Actually, this sounds like a ForthOS to me... The idea of running FORTH under Linux, or UNIX, or DOS, or Windows is actually new and "against the grain.." FORTH was designed as its own environment, the way Smalltalk was - except FORTH is small :) A Forth system can include things like assembler, editor, multitasking in less than 64k - or even less. And the way Forth is, you EXTEND the language when you "program" in it. I've not heard of a FORTH router, but why not? Would be fun to get back into FORTH again... > The Gentoo portage system also looks like it's tailor-made > to create a compile environment for LEAF. I've > successfully "installed" Gentoo into a directory on a > RedHat system. While I currently cannot (and don't want > to) boot directly into Gentoo (that wasn't the point), I > *CAN* boot into RedHat, chroot to the Gentoo system, and > ebuild to my hearts content. One of these days I'll install GenToo somewhere. However, first I've got to get my learning caught up on this OpenBSD/mac68k and Solaris/i86 I've just installed within the last week :) > With the > portage system already setup to handle system-wide user > preferences for things like target CPU, optimization > levels, etc, it should be fairly easy to make a LEAF > system specification, and allow developers to both compile > the entire system from source (very hard to do at the > moment), I'm starting to get something together myself that will do this. I'm using the FreeBSD ports tree as my model, which is where GenToo took its inspiration from. I'm trying to write everything in sh (in makefiles) - which is much more powerful than people usually think :-) I'm nearly done doing this for root.gz in Oxygen; right now I've been doing binaries, one at a time. Next will be to "gather" all of the binaries together, create a filesystem, populate it, and then compress it to create root.gz... I'll also be upgrading all of the binaries in 1.8 and 1.9 since these new binaries all use glibc 2.1 - I think some of the root binaries still use glibc 2.0 calls, since I was also creating packages at the same time and wanted to use glibc 2.0 wherever possible. Now that packages and the base (root.gz) system trees are separate.... no problem. I expect I'll upload the entire tree in one of the coming weeks. -- David Douthitt UNIX Systems Administrator HP-UX, Unixware, Linux [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Leaf-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
