Re: Drawterm and Inferno? Was: [9fans] fortune-worthy

[phillip stanley-marbell <pstanley@ece.cmu.edu>]

I recently (yesterday) got most of the inferno/utils to compile
for a device (a second VM for inferno, models Hitachi SH3)
that i did a few years ago. The obvious neat thing is that these
C programs can do things like draw on the screen via /dev/draw.

This means I now have [01258k][acl] which run over inferno.
I currently build the device into the Windows, MacOS and Linux
emu binaries. Integration into a native kernel is next (I had some
issues when i originally tried a few years ago, and lost interest).
It will be nice to have a native inferno that can build itself.

There are still a few rough edges i need to clear up, and I'm obviously
doing this for reasons best understood by myself. The speed is not
that great (currently about 10 MIPS on a P4 1GHz), but there are
ways to get almost an order of magnitude speed improvement.

I have a few other unix programs already running on it:
	bzip2, gzip, mpeg2enc, gcc (actually, just cc1).

The source for the device has been on my web page for a while,
I just recently upgraded it to fit into inferno4e.

cheers,
pip


On Dec 20, 2003, at 7:40 AM, Charles Forsyth wrote:
> might as well use/do an emulator for an existing architecture that's
> reasonably straightforward, such as MIPS (perhaps with simpler
> `kernel mode' interfaces).   unfortunately, you'd still need to do
> virtual devices and those would need to turn round and invoke
> the underlying systems's primitives, to access graphics and files for
> instance,
> so it's not clear that it simplifies things much.
>
> From: "Skip Tavakkolian" <fst@centurytel.net>
> Date: December 20, 2003 1:16:58 AM EST
> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
> Subject: Re: Drawterm and Inferno? Was: [9fans] fortune-worthy
> Reply-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
>
>
>>>> it not be relatively easy (or at least, easier than it was) to
>>>> rewrite
>>>> drawterm in limbo?
>>
>> i'd have thought it would be close to a shell script,
>> given some commands that roger has done to interact
>> with rio, that might (or might not) even be in the current
>> distribution.
>>
>> much of drawterm is similar to a large subset of emu
>> (and supporting libraries).
>
> What about a VM for the simplest machine possible that can run Plan9?
> Add a C compiler for the architecture and then everyhting just runs.
>