Rasperry Pi anyone?

Hello,
most of you have probably heard of the Rasperry Pi ARM-based small/cheap computer. It is intended to be used in
education, and so running Scratch (and of course Squeak/Pharo) on it would be nice. Currently, the debian distro
available for it includes the original Linux interpreter VM, which together with the very moderate speed of the Raspi
results in pretty awful performance (I did not try it myself, just heard about it).
I don't have a Raspi yet (figured I've got too little spare time to order one), but maybe someone else has got one?
With the ARM Cog VM developed in Lars Wassermann's GSOC project, I have real hope for a VM that would run with
acceptable speed on that little computer.

What do folks think about it?

Cheers,
Hans-Martin

On 9 August 2012 18:02, Hans-Martin Mosner <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hello,
> most of you have probably heard of the Rasperry Pi ARM-based small/cheap computer. It is intended to be used in
> education, and so running Scratch (and of course Squeak/Pharo) on it would be nice. Currently, the debian distro
> available for it includes the original Linux interpreter VM, which together with the very moderate speed of the Raspi
> results in pretty awful performance (I did not try it myself, just heard about it).

Well, I didn't expect it to be fast. I was just happy that it worked
at all, which it did (of course!).

> I don't have a Raspi yet (figured I've got too little spare time to order one), but maybe someone else has got one?
> With the ARM Cog VM developed in Lars Wassermann's GSOC project, I have real hope for a VM that would run with
> acceptable speed on that little computer.
>
> What do folks think about it?

I am more than happy to sign up to being a beta tester for the ARM Cog VM.

frank

> Cheers,
> Hans-Martin
>

Hi,
nice to hear that people are interested.
Unfortunately, running code on an actual platform is still far away. The
progress so far is that an ARM emulator and a disassembler is working
from within the image, thus allowing to start the simulator. The plugin
needed for that works in Windows. Next week I will try compiling it on
Linux, thus clearing the way for Mac.

The simulator does indeed start and generate code. It actually does
emulate some lines (finally) and even interacts with the image in
reading some words from the squeak stack. But there is still some way to
go, because the problems now are mainly with code organisation, and
generalizing the IA32 specific solution, e.g. saving the link register,
instead of expecting it being pushed and a new frame built (bl <-> call
differences). And for debugging those errors, it's hard to guess how
long it'll take.

For GSOC, there are only two weeks left, so I will most likely not
manage running even the simulator without errors within the remaining
time. But as far as code generation goes, nearly all abstract opcodes
(those from class pool RTLOpcodes) have an ARM translation. And I plan
on continuing. I also got a raspberry pi lying next to me, waiting to
run Smalltalk :).

If there is interest, I might show what I have done on ESUG. Stefan
wants me to present on the platform of the innovation award, but to me
it seems not really innovative.

See you all in Gent,
Lars

2012/08/10 2:00 pm [hidden email]
<[hidden email]>:
> I am more than happy to sign up to being a beta tester for the ARM Cog VM.
>
> frank