Several of my readers recently let me know (privately and in the Forum) that they are ready to pioneer the battlefield use of FFA. However they all have one question, “When the hell will be the beta release? And just how much spade work remains, and where?” And so I have written this projection, to […]
At present, I have taken a break from the hardware aspects of Loper – to work on “Jupiter,” a Linux-based emulator of the system’s essential aspects. (Think QEMU.) Jupiter is unlikely to be of any practical use to anyone but myself. However, at some point, I will make it public, so that interested persons who […]
Loper’s I2C controller is working. The SPD ROM on the DDR2 RAM stick attached to the Xilinx ML-501 board is read correctly. The video controller is working (though not feature-complete.) The DDR2 SDRAM controller is still under testing, as is the cache SRAM controller. The gigabit Ethernet controller is not yet complete. I should probably […]
The tool described in this post may be helpful to other ab initio machine-architecture developers. If any exist. The rest of Loper will remain in my private code repository, because it is not a collaborative project. Meet Stierlitz [1], perhaps the world’s strangest bus analyzer. For basic use, it requires no software at all on […]
Progress has been slow, because I have been otherwise occupied for quite some time. Slow, but not entirely still. Since turning Loper OS into an ab initio CPU architecture project, I have been using Xilinx development boards for prototyping. For the past year — an ML-501. The FPGA toolchain itself is (grudgingly) Linux-friendly, but those […]
Is there a ballpoint pen in your pocket? How fast is it? What do you mean, you don’t know? You didn’t ask the salesman? There is indeed a maximum speed at which the little ball in the pen can roll and still leave a satisfactory trace of ink upon the page. Would you pay extra […]
This is a repost of my YC news comment on the subject. Lame reposting is not a capital offense (yet…) My first encyclopedia when I was young was a CD-ROM edition of Britannica. It had a superficially deep article on almost everything, and made for endless hours of joyful exploration. Then one day I found […]
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.)
