[Cuis-dev] Embedded Squeak/Cuis

[ken.dickey at whidbey.com]

On 2020-09-03 16:17, Casey Ransberger via Cuis-dev wrote:
...
> Anyway, I’m super glad we’ve got Cuis running in the framebuffer. X11
> is over-rated anyway. We still have the problem of needing to drag a
> whole operating system (there shouldn’t be one) along with us if we
> want to be able to use a web browser, and we kind of need to use a web
> browser nowadays (sigh.)

The updated vm-diaplay-fbdev code is now integrated into the 
opensmalltalk-vm [Thanks Eliot!].

Still a few bumps with MUSL+autoconf.  Hey, autoconf is way to complex 
for me, but you can do a git pull on the opensmalltalk-vm and have 
vm-display-fbdev with the official vm.

I did a build of vm-display-fbdev on an old Dell amd64 box (Alpin Linux, 
libevdev, musl) which worked fine.

FYI, the Netsurf browser works with SDL1.2 on a framebuffer.  Perhaps we 
should look at it as well as the old Scamper code and get something up.

I also built opensmalltalk-vm on Rasperry Pi 4 under Mandrivia 
(customized Arch; X11+libc) and Alpine Linux (framebuffer+MUSL) and 
LePotato under Armbian (framebuffer+libc).

I have looked at "bare metal" aarch64/arm64 but the IRQ, virtual memory, 
USB drivers, INet, ... is really daunting.  Life is too short for me to 
roll my own OS.

I am happy with a small "shim" OS which someone else maintains for this. 
  Not really my area of value added.

The microkernel/unikernel (Xen,KVM) hardware abstraction layer looks 
interesting if someone wants to go that route.

One foot in front of the other..
-KenD