On Jan 4, 2015, at 11:50 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd
<markMLl.openfirmware(a)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.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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