Re: [9fans] Inferno on microcontrollers

[Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>]

On Sun, 31 Dec 2017 18:28:48 +0000 "Brian L. Stuart" <blstuart@bellsouth.net> wrote:
Brian L. Stuart writes:
> On Sun, 12/31/17, Rui Carmo <rui.carmo@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I honestly don't think Plan9 or Inferno will become
> > "general use" without (at the very least) a modern
> > browser,
> 
> For which we can all be grateful.  "General use" is not a
> good thing to be desired.  One of the biggest reasons I
> moved away from Linux was that it was becoming too
> mainstream for me.

I don't think we can assume a more popular plan9 would have
met the fate of Linux. What bothers (some of) us is not that
Linux is mainstream but that it is far too complicated and
kitchensinky. Guess we will never know!

> > Inferno, dis and 9p seem like a good fit for
> > embedded devices,
> 
> Very true.
> 
> > So I'd like to know if anyone here knows about
> > recent efforts to run Inferno on other tiny
> > machines...
> 
> Not particularly recent, but several years ago I ported
> Inferno to the SunSPOT device.  As I recall, the version
> I was using had 1MB of RAM and 4MB of flash.  It took
> some squeezing (like severely reducing the size of the
> ARP tables), but I did get it running including IPv6 over
> the 802.15.4 radio in it.

Wasn't Styx-on-a-Brick running on a device with 32K RAM + 16K
ROM? Though that was for controlling a Lego Mindstorm device.

Recently on another mailing list someone wanted a secure
"personal" encrypted filesystem on a removable SDcard. 
Even the encryption key is fed at runtime so if you just
have the SD card, it appears to contain random junk.  I
suggested a Raspi Zero but I think it would be possible to
build this using an ESP8266 device, talking 9p (or html).
May be you can even send the FS encryption key over 9p!