Mitch Bradley wrote:
On Jan 4, 2015, at 11:50 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl.openfirmware@telemetry.co.uk wrote: James Cameron wrote:
On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 08:34:45AM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
If one instead tolerates the existing multi-stage loader, then one should be able to boot Forth onto the application processor in lieu of Linux. But this breaks the Sun model of "Open Boot in ROM, everything else on disc", and loses the desirable characteristic that any media or controller problem returns you to the "ok" prompt with diagnostic capabilities, and as such I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
I agree.
I'd be interested to know of any low-cost boards which could have OpenFirmware grafted in sufficiently early. A colleague is trying to build some router systems which, as a prerequisite, must have a serial console port.
I'm interested too. Perhaps the BeagleBone Black? I've brought up C Forth on the Teensy 3.1, which while it isn't Open Firmware does share some behaviours enough to make me feel at home. But no filesystems or TCP/IP. http://quozl.linux.org.au/cforth-on-teensy/
One of the interesting features of OBP/OpenFirmware is the extent that it allows you to explore partition tables etc. so that you can see why things are going wrong. That sort of thing really is valuable for headless systems, I struggled with Slugs as routers for a while and not having a decent console really was a pain.
As James said, BeagleBone Black could be a contender.
I agree, but the only mention I see of the combination turns out to be limited to DeviceTree. Another alternative would obviously be one of the resurgent MIPS boards.