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 > |
In reply to this post by Hans-Martin Mosner
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 |
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