NooneAtAll510 hours ago
> On top of that, Sylphide OS adds:
> drivers for mouse, keyboard, display, storage and network
and couple lines later
> What you don't have yet, but definitely planned:
> storage (microsd, usb) > network (ethernet, wifi)
I'm not gonna be angry at false advertising, but OS attempts only become appropriate to discuss once you made drivers and actually ran stuff on physical hardware
Before that point it's just one of the many dozens and dozens other half-efforted attempts at OS that have been done over and over to death by now
iamnothereop9 hours ago
Well, given that it’s built on FreeRTOS, this stuff should be fairly cheap to implement. I think you’re being a little overly critical for an early stage project that fills an interesting niche (GUI OS for MCUs).
skew-aberration3 hours ago
It's so platform dependent though, for many FreeRTOS targets I think you're just gonna be integrating against a vendor specific stack
Rochus9 hours ago
> Olimex esp32-p4-pc, the flagship product: new, powerful
That's a very cool board, but pretty tricky. Great idea to run an old Mac OS on it. I try on and off to port the Oberon System 3 to this board since I received it in February. The display already works pretty good, but still a lot of road blocks.
exe34an hour ago
Hi, Could you say a few words what makes this board tricky? I've wanted to get one for a similar reason as the OP, although I'm thinking a scheme-like VM with GUI.
iamnothereop9 hours ago
Oberon would be a great fit for this board, your efforts are appreciated.
It’s amazing how these inexpensive “MCUs” (not even sure you can call them that) are overtaking old PCs now.
Rochus9 hours ago
Thanks, I hope I'll be able to get it done in a timely manner. Currently I have to decompose the statically linked inner core because it doesn't fit into the dedicated memory slot anymore. Did you also have issues with the ttyACM0 connection which starts to drop regularly under certain conditions?
It's indeed amazing that these MCUs essentially correspond to or even exceed the performance of the original Ceres systems in the nineties. The Oberon System and also the later AOS/Bluebottle multi core system are particularly suited for today's MCUs because they don't assume an MMU.
iamnothereop8 hours ago
Oh, I’m not the developer of this, I just follow these sorts of projects because I’m interested in alternative OSes and particularly OSes that run under constrained environments. I haven’t personally tested it. There’s several of these under development now, as well as many emulators; the ESP CYD (and clones) seems to be a favored target.
irdc11 hours ago
If it's running on MMU-less systems, I'd be interested in how it loads multiple programs into memory: does it need to relocate each program binary? If so, doesn't that preclude using execute-in-place (XIP)?
Arelius10 hours ago
Generally, running in a MMU without static task config would require relocatable binaries. I'm not sure why it'd preclude execute-in-place. As a relocatable binary should be executable from generally any address space. However I suspect that hardware without an MMU is not super likely to be able to support XIP.
It is based on FreeRTOS, so it should be fairly well documented.
dvdkon10 hours ago
> I suspect that hardware without an MMU is not super likely to be able to support XIP.
This seems strange to me. Don't most microcontrollers support executing directly from flash? Some even can't execute from RAM.
Though I agree with the main point, you can compile code as "PIC" - position independent code, and not bother with (ELF) relocations except for linking.
ranger_danger8 hours ago
> Don't most microcontrollers support executing directly from flash?
Yes... I presume they meant XIP for multiple programs at once, since you'd need an MMU for that.
dmitrygr3 hours ago
> since you'd need an MMU for that.
Or PIC code... PalmOS 5 & 6 allowed multiple programs in same memory and they were simply compiled pic. MMU was not used
Some architectures (ARM, RISCV, aarch64) are well suited for this kind of code. Others are extremely poorly suited (x86, MIPS), but all CAN do it
actionfromafar8 hours ago
Or the program use relative addressing.
topspin7 hours ago
"COM" programs as seen in MS DOS and earlier CP/M systems contain only relative addresses, and can run from any "segment" of RAM, as the addresses are relative to the value of a segment register. This was used to load "background" services, typically servicing hardware devices.
MCUs with MMUs are starting to appear, such as the ESP32-S31.
karlkloss7 hours ago
On one hand: Cool!
On the other hand: I have a lot of old hardware in my 'too good to go' garbage bin that can run a full fledged Linux, so what.
gaiya3657 hours ago
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