[Tfug] Native Inferno (was: Partition Second Drive)

[Bexley Hall]

Hi, Stephen,

--- Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:

Apologies for following up on my own post... :<

> > Maybe I should ask instead, does Inferno always
> > rely on third party code to manage its memory
> > allocation, its disk access, or its scheduling.
> > Can it do any of those things natively on any
> > hardware.
> 
> I believe all of the existing 4th Ed. distributions
> are hosted on other OS's.  But, the design of the
> system is such that you could put the equivalent of
> a "hardware abstraction layer" under Inferno and
> get rid of the hosting OS and things would run just
> fine.  (though this is nontrivial -- and, non
> portable!)
> 
> I think there was a bare metal port of 3rd Ed. but
> I am not sure if that was available to the "general
> public"  (I can dig through my email archives and
> see -- but that would take a fair bit of effort :<
> ).

>From some (very) old notes:  (+ current commentary)

Native ports of Inferno (recall, this is 3rd Ed.)
run on AMD29000, SA1100 (this was where my interest
lay), "Intel" (though perhaps not "PC's" per se).

* Sword, Brutus, and other SBC-type platforms.
* PPC 603e, 823/821/860
* 3com Edgeserver
* Javastation 1

Kernels (in various states of support) are
distributed for SA1100, MPC8xx and [345]86 machines
plus the JS1.

Unfortunately, the targets that *I* am interested in
(e.g., StrongARM) were obsolescent/obsolete at that
time (Intel bought the SA from DEC and then killed
it, sadly).  And, getting access to a DNARD or
similar test bed for development work was more
effort than it was worth -- hence the need to do a
new port to some more generic ARM, etc. if I wanted
to follow this line.  (As mentioned, the new license
made that unattractive).

So, the short answer is:  "Yes, Inferno runs (ran?) on
bare metal".

HTH,
--don



 
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