Blue Swirl wrote:
For a scientific space project I'm thinking about including an FCode interpreter into the onboard software. The target system is a Leon3 processor (Sparc-V8) in FPGA with serial port(s), spacewire and a few other interfaces. I'm able to compile & run bare C applications (gcc cross-compiler), so it seems to me that I don't need a real BIOS.
So you probably won't need SCSI or floppy drivers or any of the filesystems. These can be disabled by editing config/examples/cross-sparc32_config.xml.
Thanks, I'll try to disable them.
What kind of serial port is this, Zilog or PC (16550)?
None of the above, a special serial interface integrated into the processor. You can simply assume, that stdin/stdout are connected to the serial port at main() startup.
Ideally the complete FORTH system should be in the range of 32-40 kBytes...
That can be difficult to achieve, currently the full build is 150k C code + 100k Forth. I don't know how much of the Forth is needed. Taking out unwanted drivers etc. could help a lot on C side, but down to 30-40k?
Really that large ? I don't have experience with 32-bit Forth'es. 16-Bit systems usually have a small footprint. Okay, I have a 64 KByte PROM, and I forgot that the code could be compressed, perhaps a FCode interpreter for ~64 kByte could do it...
Thanks & regards, Rolf.