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 [...]
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 say [...]
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 the [...]
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 for [...]
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 [...]
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 a [...]
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.)