BIOS Replacement
Look into what might be needed to do an actual BIOS replacement that has the ilo vm in x86 ROM.
Project board
ilo
ilo is a virtual computer implementing a dual stack processor with a simple instruction set and a few i/o devices. It's small and can be easily implemented and/or extended by an individual programmer.
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Suggestions
2Write a spec for external i/o extensions via block-based RPC
konilo.sh
1Add support for more ilo implementations to be selected
implementations
39C
C++
C#
Ada
Common Lisp
D
Fortran 77
F#
Go
Hare
Haskell
Java
Kotlin
Lua
Nim
Oberon
Pascal
Python
RetroForth
Rust
Scheme
Smalltalk
Swift
TypeScript
Zig
aarch64 assembly
I have a working one derived from use of a C compiler, but want to replace this with a handwritten one.
8088 assembly
x86 assembly
amd64 assembly
Web Assembly
TCL
apl
gnu apl Testing new dispatch: ∇ STEP OP;A;B;C;T;S;L;Q →OP⊃END LI DU DR SW PU PO JU CA CC CJ RE EQ NE LT GT FE ST AD SU MU DI AN OR XO SL SR CP CY IO ...
awk
cobol
gnu cobol
Erlang
forth
gforth
j
perl
racket
New Implementations
13prolog
swi prolog
PowerPC assembly
PowerPC-64 assembly
riscv32 assembly
riscv64 assembly
ruby
cobol
crystal
postscript
raku
ocaml
julia
BASIC
For yabasic
Documentation
5More detail on the number handling in cases of overflow
Suggest behavior for error handling
Most error handling should be left to the implementer, but the spec should suggest ways to handle common conditions
Write full spec for current graphica extension (graphica-0)
Write full spec for the future graphica extension (graphica-1)
Write spec for pointer devices
VHDL
12identify target boards
- Cmod A7 - ICEPI Zero
cpu core: stacks
cpu core: instruction decode
cpu core: instructions
devices: uart tx
devices: uart rx
devices: sdram controller
devices: sram8 controller
devices: memory interface
devices: generic block store
devices: fifo
ghdl simulation
esp32
8Overview
ESP32 is appealing from a cost perspective. There's a lot of cheap boards with interesting I/O options. Initial work is targeting the FabGL-VGA32 board, but I'm looking at others as well.
target boards
fabgl-vga32: vga display
Support text display over the VGA port
fabgl-vga32: serial i/o
Support terminal via serial.
fabgl-vga32: blocks & rom on SD card
fabgl-vga32: add ps/2 keyboard support
fabgl-vga32: prepare for commit
xteink-x4: evaluate feasibility
- RAM is limiting - has SD card support - Display has enough pixels - Would need keyboard support - Might be able to borrow from microslate for some of the work NOTE: This seems viable. Work on the process will begin this month, but is not a high priority target. We will need to implement swap to SD card for some of the RAM. This device has about 380K available RAM, which is a bit too tight to fit everything in RAM. Plan is to keep the system buffers and most of the lower half in actual RAM, and swap the middle pages of RAM out as needed.
rp2350
6Overview
The RP2350 is a very inexpensive target. It has adequate RAM and good performance. This is currently the main target for my embedded projects.
serial i/o
Support terminal via serial.
rom in system flash
blocks in system flash
support for external storage for blocks
📝It'd be beneficial to support reading & writing blocks on an SD card, FRAM module, or other external storage.
commit remaining source files, notes
teensy4.1
7Overview
This was the original embedded target. It has plenty of RAM, good performance, and an SD card slot. It's unfortunately expensive compared to RP2350 and ESP32 targets though.
serial i/o
Support terminal via serial.
blocks & rom on sd card
host device: rtc
host device: display
It'd be useful to support an LCD display showing the terminal.
host device: ps2 keyboard
Going along with a display, it'd be useful to support PS/2 keyboards for input.
host device: usb keyboard
Going along with a display, it'd be useful to support USB keyboards for input.
UEFI
9amd64: keyboard input
amd64: graphics output protocol
basic GOP support
amd64: terminal emulation
basic term. emulator capable of supporting konilo's (termina) vocabulary
amd64: storage support
- read/write blocks from a partition - read rom from a partition
aarch64: evaluate portability
update USB boot image with current rom, blocks
Write tooling to automatically rebuild USB boot image
Add support for Graphica-1
Mouse Support
Testing
1Expand automated instruction set tests
Source Tree
3Move native/ under ilo-vm/
move embedded targets under ilo-vm/embedded/
Move experimental VM models to ilo-vm/experimental
ilo & graphics
2Minimal 1bpp Mode
- Simple framebuffer - Monochrome - Set/fetch pixel - Get mouse button state Supported Targets: - X11 - Wayland - Windows - SDL - UEFI Future: - HTML Canvas
Graphica-1
- Color palate support - Drawing primitives: - pixel - line - hline - vline - rect - circle - triangle - filled versions of each - paint region - non-blocking keyboard support Targets: - X11 - Wayland - Windows - SDL - HTML Canvas