Loper should not be considered truly dead until I myself am dead and buried. Currently available computing systems are brain-damaged in such wholesale, unmitigable ways that I am driven back to the project again and again, despite the oceanic size and nearly certain futility of the task. Working full time and being back in school (in [...]
I feel obligated to remind my readers that the Loper repository does not yet contain a working operating system. (Unless you count a boot loader which performs basic x86-64 hardware initializations and prints “Hello World” as one.)
The “Hello World” kernel boots, loads, initializes interrupts and paging, and switches successfully into 64-bit Long Mode.
Now, the real fun can start.
The bootloader runs.
There is truly no excuse for this to have taken so long.
—-
No, I couldn’t have used GRUB – considering that a C compiler is (permanently) out of the question.
If you don’t understand why, (re)read posts 0…N.
In the unlikely event that someone is still reading this, I would like to point out: the project lives.
I am still trying to figure out just how much resemblance to a proper Lisp Machine can be savagely beaten into an AMD Opteron. The focus remains on low-level details of the variety which, when changed, dynamite [...]
Arc has made quite an impression on me. Implementing it on the bare metal feels like a worthy and tempting goal.
On the other hand, I am saddened by the invincibility of the “programs as plain ASCII streams” dogma even among supposed iconoclasts.
1) There surely must be a better way to figure out the Cirrus Logic GD5446 video card than by reading the QEMU sources.
2) It appears that I never explained where the project’s name came from. It could, if you like, refer to a Lisp Operating system. I must, however, confess that it is the name [...]
The temptation to implement a modernized Lisp architecture in a high-end FPGA never ceases to tug at me. It has recently re-asserted itself after my discovery that one can buy reasonably priced and fully assembled boards containing the latter, complete with SDRAM, DVI, SATA, etc. sockets. Verilog guides have silently crept into my browser tabs [...]
The linked list is a less-than-welcome guest on modern machine architectures, for reasons which are well-known.
I am trying to determine if the difference between current cache and main memory speeds (as well as other concerns) have made CDR coding attractive again. It has traditionally been considered a no-no on any machine lacking hardware-assisted tagging. I [...]
The Architecture of Symbolic Computers (Peter M. Kogge) is quite possibly the most useful resource I have come across in my quest thus far. If you are interested in Lisp Machine revival, non-von Neumann computation, or the dark arts of the low-level implementation of functional programming systems, you will not be disappointed.
More generally, I consider [...]
