Squeak on Parallella board

I was about to get my new Parallela (http://www.parallella.org/) board
running on Monday, but was too busy to touch it the rest of the week. I
found it interesting that among the short list of included applications
in the default Ubuntu 14 distribution both Scratch and Squeak were
present. Scratch seemed to run well enough, but there weren't any Squeak
images.

Today I decided to go to the Squeak site (which is, thankfully working
again) and download the 4.5 all-in-one zip. I wasn't sure if the
pre-supplied ARMv7 4.10.2-2614 virtual machine would be happy with the
latest image but it worked just fine.

Running "0 tinyBenchmarks" resulted in 56.5 million bytecodes/sec and
1.7 million sends/sec, which is about one tenth of the speed of the
system I am typing this on. The Parallella has a dual Cortex A9 ARM
running at 667MHz and with a 400MHz DDR3 main memory.

Of course, this isn't using any of the interesting features on the
board. The chip with the ARM cores has a very reasonable FPGA in it and
there is the Epiphany III chip with 16 cores, each with 32KB of local
memory and 64 bit floating point.

-- Jecel

Well, what a coincidence. I’m sat here with Sebastian Heidbrink and his Parallella, trying to build a stackVM. My, what fun. The gcc setup on this doesn’t provide the same defines for architecture etc as Raspbian, so that is causing some fun with things like the atomic ops. And it appears to dislike
# if defined (FOO) && defined(BAR)
as well, somehow. Right now it’s whining pathetically about sqLowLevelFence.

The good news is that we got the same performance figures on a plain interp as Jecel.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
"Bother" said Pooh, as his trigger finger tired.

I was able to get Tim's stack VM for ARMv6 to build on an ARMv7 (the BeagleBone Black) by basically extending Tim's changes for the RPi to allow an ARMv7 as well. But I don't know how this translates to Parallella .. would be great if there was only minor tweaks required.

Doug


On Jun 13, 2014, at 16:58 , tim Rowledge wrote:

On 13-06-2014, at 6:30 PM, Douglas McPherson <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I was able to get Tim's stack VM for ARMv6 to build on an ARMv7 (the BeagleBone Black) by basically extending Tim's changes for the RPi to allow an ARMv7 as well. But I don't know how this translates to Parallella .. would be great if there was only minor tweaks required.

If you could send me the changes you made it would probably help to get Seb up and running. I think we probably need  cleaner set of tests than we have, too.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: RJT: Read and Jam Tape

I will send them to you when I'm back in front of my BeagleBoneBlack tomorrow. I've been meaning to send to you/Eliot for possible inclusion but alas  ...

Note though that what I did IIRC was just allow your #defines restricting to armv6 to apply for any arm. Probably not strictly kosher, but it worked in this case.

Doug


On Jun 13, 2014, at 19:26 , tim Rowledge wrote: