August 2016 - Oberon - mailman3.inf.ethz.ch

Re: [Oberon] Data transfer in large amounts
by Paul Reed 05 Sep '16

05 Sep '16

Dear Wojtek, > This size fits well in a NOR flash chip whose size is limited to 64 MB. I did consider an SPI flash chip, which would have been a more appropriate size, but (micro)SD-cards are more freely available for not much difference in cost. > "doing" is indicative of some sort of a plan. Would you mind sharing your > plan, a roadmap, and the future of FPGA Oberon? FWIW, I shared my own personal roadmap during Oberon Day 2011 (I've posted links to the talks here before), and posted here updates to what I'm doing and how and why some particular things were done. In general, the material is presented as-is, for careful study, in the hope that it may be useful. Some people have given us really great, considered and constructive feedback and excellent contributions of work, which often results in very satisfying fixes to certain issues. We are very grateful for this. But you are mistaken if you expect there is a team, an updating plan/roadmap, a version control system, ongoing feature development, "releases", a service-level agreement, sponsorship or finance like in a large open-source software or hardware project. And we are certainly not being secretive, rather, trying to help as much as we can with very limited resources! Perhaps you would be happier with one of those much bigger projects, several of which now run on FPGAs. You certainly seem to want a lot for nothing and appear to need the support of a much larger community - you do not carefully follow even the small amount of links provided both on Prof. Wirth's home page (where he notifies significant changes to his whole site in the news file) and for example the FAQ on http://projectoberon.com; and previous posts on this forum; where many of your questions would be answered and some of your criticisms rendered moot when you understand the context. HTH, Paul

5 5

Data transfer in large amounts
by Paul Reed 05 Sep '16

05 Sep '16

Dear Wojtek, > ...possible applications of the FPGA Oberon... would be > easier to develop if the SD card could be read under the workstation OS > as a regular SD card. Are there any plans to develop the common file > system which would make it possible? > ...the prime reason to develop instruments > running the FPGA Oberon OS would be to collect data...if I collect a 2GB data file > then I would like to easily and efficiently transfer it to the analysis > environment. Trickling the file through the wireless or serial is not > quite adequate in this case. Clearly. But I don't think there is anything in the pipeline which would save you work in your specific use-case very much, it's quite outside the scope of what we are doing: a 2GB file won't fit on a 64MB filesystem, for a start. Sorry! But of course Oberon presents far fewer barriers to "doing it yourself", with absolute control, than other more mainstream systems. HTH Paul

5 11

Re (2): Oberon on 4K Displays
by peter＠easthope.ca 26 Aug '16

26 Aug '16

From: Peter Matthias <PeterMatthias(a)web.de> Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2016 22:31:42 +0200 > BTW, current version of OLR includes HiDPI mode on X11 > when screen width is more than 3000 pixel by just > quadrupling every pixel. First I've heard of HiDPI and found some explanation here. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI Thanks, ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

1 0

Oberon on 4K Displays
by Peter Matthias 25 Aug '16

25 Aug '16

My next computer should be 4k capable. Oberon (for me OLR) by default will have font sizes much too small to be readable. Of course, I could just double every pixel. However, I would like to know if there are develoments on the way on this topic. Regards, Peter

1 1

Re: [Oberon] Oberon on Ultibo on RPi w/o Linux
by Treutwein Bernhard 25 Aug '16

25 Aug '16

John R. Strohm* wrote: [...] > It would be nice to recompile all that with an ARM-target compiler, and > (eventually) wind up with a complete Oberon system running bare-metal (as > opposed to hosted under Linux) on the Raspberry Pi. > > The long pole in the tent is the display driver. oops: OLR on ARM has an ARM native compiler. I think it would use ultibo as hardware abstraction layer instead of Linux ... @Peter: is this correct? -- Bernhard

2 3

Oberon on Ultibo
by greim 25 Aug '16

25 Aug '16

Hallo Bernhard et. al. I m just a little busy in my job, but I will continuo wit UltibOberon as soon as I have a little bit more free time again. Maybe you may help me with one problem: Actually I am using a quite stupid cache mechanism to minimize screen refreshes. Its a simply compare bit by bit of the new and old framebuffer. Finally the RPI is redrawing only a rectangle with pixels changed. My ides is to set a window of interest always when the RISC5 processor is accessing the RISC5 framebuffer address range. I am not sure if its more "cost effective" because any video access needs at least 2..3 more compare operations. Can be also tested with the original emulator of Peter. By the way, I believe Peters keyboard emulator is more complicated as necessary. If you try to test Oberon on Ultibo, please don't forget to use an USB hub for the mouse and/or keyboard. Regards Markus

1 0

Oberon on Ultibo
by greim 17 Aug '16

17 Aug '16

Hallo, BananaPi etc. AFAIK the ultibo team is also working on ports to other similar ARM boards like the BananaPi, buth ultibo is a brand new project, so many things are still in the pipeline. The other question, regarding OLR: Ultibo is using FreePascal as compiler. As far as I understood, you have to translate all the Ultibo things, like graphic, mouse, keyboard, gpio etc. from FreePascal to Oberon. Thats possible, but a hell of work I fear. Maybe it would be easier to make an Oberon compatibility switch for the FreePascal Compiler. Markus

3 2

Oberon on Ultibo on RPi w/o Linux
by greim 16 Aug '16

16 Aug '16

Hallo, i have juts tried to port the OBERON RISC Emulator of Peter de Wachter to Ultibo (http://www.ultibo.org) That's an OBERON emulator on bare metal Raspberry Pi. You may find it at: https://github.com/MGreim/ultiboberon What is Ultibo ? Citation from the Ultibo web-site: "Ultibo core is an embedded or bare metal development environment for Raspberry Pi. It is not an operating system but provides many of the same services as an OS, things like memory management, networking, filesystems and threading plus much more." What they write only in the footnote is: "Ultibo is written entirely in Free Pascal and is designed to act as a unikernel or a kernel in a run time library. That means when you compile your application the necessary parts of Ultibo are automatically included by the compiler so that your program runs without needing an operating system." Maybe they are shaming to be non-C guys. For all, not yet knowing what the Raspberry Pi is: The Raspberry Pi is a series of cheap credit card-sized single-board computers. The smallest model costs here in Germany incl. tax 15 EUR, the biggest iron 38 EUR. Here we have 4 ARM cores @ 1 GHz, HDMI, USB, Network interface, PIO, LED,audio, etc. etc. + 1 GByte + SD card etc. The RPI is mostly used with LINUX. That's nice, but with LINUX you are far, far away from the hardware. And its quite crazy for my opinion, to use Gigabytes of code to blink a LED. So what is Ultibo for me: A very nice tool! You have more or less infinite RAM and power, you can and MUST write all programs in PASCAL, and you have with Lazarus a real nice and fast development environment for Windows and Linux (with Wine) My intension to bring OBERON to Ultibo on the RPI without Linux! 0. Having a total type save Wirthian system! 1. A proof of concept and test for Ultibo. 2. Having an OBERON system for 15 EUR 3. Having direct hardware access from OBERON. Up to now only the Blink.Run works, but integrate GPIO, the serial interface etc. may be done with only a few lines of code. 4. Its quite easy to expand OBERON with some TCP/IP functionality, which is already part of the Ultibo libraries. 5. Maybe in the future OBERON can be used as a kind of intelligent shell for Ultibo, including editor, compiler etc. # Hints, Design, Problems etc. 1. The software is __pre-beta__! 2. There is a bug in the USB interface in Ultibo. You __must__ use an USB hub to connect mouse and keyboard. At least one of both must be connected via the hub. There seems to be a DMA problem for slow HID devices. Its a known issue. 3. Due to lack of time, I have the code only tested for the RPI2. 4. I have realized the sw in one single thread following Wirths original design. 5. The code is not optimized for performance at all. 6. The RISC5 code and the FPU code is from 2014, the latest FPU improvements etc. are not coded yet. 7. The OBERON file system is encapsulated in one single file oberon.dsk, it would be nice for sure, to mirror it in FAT or similar. 8. The disk image is from Peter de Wachter at: https://github.com/pdewacht/oberon-risc-emu/blob/master/DiskImage/Oberon-20… 9. Ultibo has no command line options, so everything is hard coded. 10. the F4 and F12 keys are not working yet. (* 11. For Non-Oberonians: Before you play with the software please read: https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/UsingOberon.pdf The using of the mouse and the windows (here called viewers) is different from the Windows or OsX world. Even if Allen, Wozniak, Gates and Jobs said that they have been at least "inspired" by the ALTO system they had seen at Xerox. 12. You need a 3 button mouse. 13. .. and many more.. *) 14. Only tested with a 1280 x 1024 screen Regards Markus

4 7

Re: [Oberon] Oberon on Ultibo on RPi w/o Linux
by Treutwein Bernhard 16 Aug '16

16 Aug '16

absolutely, very interested, although I don't have much time currently -- Bernhard -----Original Message----- From: Peter Matthias [PeterMatthias(a)web.de] Received: Montag, 15 Aug. 2016, 19:04 To: [oberon(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch] Subject: Re: [Oberon] Oberon on Ultibo on RPi w/o Linux Am 14.08.2016 um 17:04 schrieb greim: > > i have juts tried to port the OBERON RISC Emulator of Peter de Wachter > to Ultibo (http://www.ultibo.org) > > That's an OBERON emulator on bare metal Raspberry Pi. > > You may find it at: https://github.com/MGreim/ultiboberon Any interest to use the available OLR on ARM for ultioberon? Regards, Peter

1 0

Re (2): Global font change on OLR and 4K resolution.
by peter＠easthope.ca 16 Aug '16

16 Aug '16

From: Peter Matthias <PeterMatthias(a)web.de> Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2016 19:00:46 +0200 > This conventions uses libX11 which lacks in OLR. OK, thanks. I missed that. Therefore will revert to the suggestion of "variables" for the location of the corner of the window. Eg. OX and OY or OXOFFSET and OYOFFSET. More convenient than recompilation of Display.Mod and more tolerable to *nix devotees. Thanks, ... Lyall E. -- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 Tel +1 360 639 0202 http://easthope.ca/Peter.html Bcc: peter at easthope. ca

1 0