[squeak-dev] Is anyone maintaining a VM for Linux on the ARM architecture?

This week I was looking around at the 'state of the art' in low power  
and mobile linux options and was pretty impressed with some of the  
things being done on the ARM architecture and was just curious if  
anyone out there is maintaining a VM for this platform running on  
Linux?  If there aren't, has anyone put together any sort of porting  
notes documentation that might point out things to keep in mind when  
porting?  Just curious re: what I'm getting myself into when  
considering this...

Thanks,
Phil

That's a really good question. I have some embedded systems with ARM
processors. Some with and without graphic output. What kind of
performances we would have with Squeak on such things? Memory and disk
space would perhaps be a problem. Mmm..

Ian.

--
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/

Porting information can be found here

http://isqueak.org/PlatformVMAPI


On 11-Apr-09, at 8:49 AM, Phil (list) wrote:

--
=
=
=
========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <[hidden email]>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
=
=
=
========================================================================

On Apr 11, 2009, at 12:23 PM, John M McIntosh wrote:

> Porting information can be found here
>
> http://isqueak.org/PlatformVMAPI
>

Thanks John.  I didn't realize that you had documented this as part of  
your iPhone porting effort.  (which, in large part,  is what has got  
me thinking about this)   I need to poke around the iSqueak pages some  
more...

Phil

On 4/12/09, Phil (list) <[hidden email]> wrote:
> This week I was looking around at the 'state of the art' in low power
> and mobile linux options and was pretty impressed with some of the
> things being done on the ARM architecture and was just curious if
> anyone out there is maintaining a VM for this platform running on
> Linux?  If there aren't, has anyone put together any sort of porting
> notes documentation that might point out things to keep in mind when
> porting?  Just curious re: what I'm getting myself into when
> considering this...

Ironically, I'm trying to compile the VM for a Jornada 820 running a
Linux 2.4 kernel.

My current problem is that the VM doesn't work if you compile it
without any plugins at all. I only have 16MB of RAM to play with on
this device. It only starts up with a blank screen on my main x86
machine. Any ideas?

Previously I've run Squeak under Windows CE on the same device, and
even succesfully written code using it. It's slow and I needed to make
a custom MVC image.

Gulik.

--
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/

On 4/12/09, Michael van der Gulik <[hidden email]> wrote:
Found it. My image won't start up if the BalloonEnginePlugin isn't internal.

This may or may not be a bug... I'm still investigating.

Gulik.

--
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/

On 4/12/09, Michael van der Gulik <[hidden email]> wrote:
http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7334

Gulik.

--
http://gulik.pbwiki.com/

Ok, further to this, I had some nice engineers at Apple give me some  
feedback on Virtual memory on the iPhone.  One thought was to look at
mincore -- determine residency of memory pages, refer to sys/mman.h  
because man page is incorrect,
So let's see what is up.

First I had to cleanup things a bit to ensure the VM or the image  
didn't march thru all the objects when starting up via allInstances.

After this, with a development image which is  5MB larger than the  
wikiserver image I found..

3937 pages to hold image file (old space, no young space).

2823 pages NOT in memory

139 pages MINCORE_INCORE
786 pages MINCORE_REFERENCED & incore
189 pages MINCORE_MODIFIED & incore  & referenced


So I'm sure Craig will grin, shades of work he is doing at the object  
level, but here we have a image
of 16,125,952 bytes,  but only 4,562,944 bytes (more or less) is  
active for what it's doing, anyway the
key effort was to avoid allInstances and a full GC at startup time so  
that we don't drag all  3937pages
into RAM from flash.


On 11-Apr-09, at 9:23 AM, John M McIntosh wrote:

>

--
=
=
=
========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <[hidden email]>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
=
=
=
========================================================================