Genode and RISC OS continued
I am a RISC OS user and I love RISC OS.
I think the most important part of it is the desktop and the applications. RISC OS is a bit archaic. It is a single task system, with cooperative multitasking windowing system bolted on top of the kernel task. It is very fast and runs on a computer with as little as 4 MB of RAM. But it has some drawbacks. An application can easily take control over the system and do whatever it likes. If using a kernel module it can turn off interrupts which means that the kernel stops. This makes it a fun system to code on, but it also means no security or component isolation.
I think that RISC OS would gain a lot of co-exist with a system like Genode.
In my previous blog I made a little list:
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Doing the CPU emulation.
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Decide on how to integrate the RISC OS desktop with Genode.
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Possibly running Genode applications ( the browser is a hot candidate) on the RISC OS desktop.
I decided to start with a soc , Rockchip RK3588 , which has a 64bit only cpu. It does have a 32bit capable cpu as well , but in this case I wanted the big one.
The first task is to get Genode running on it. The u-boot, bootloader, support most hardware, so I thought that it was a quick job and indeed it was. The only low level part that didn't work was EL (Exception level) switching in Genode. I guess that u-boot leaves me in a cpu state that Genode doesn't expect.The workaround was to start Genode in EL1. That worked and I could work on other tasks, but I realised that in the end the EL switching has to be solved.
Today I solved it by adding register clearing to Genodes startup file.
A photo of the new port running: _
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So I am now moving on to the first task in the list. 32bit emulation. I have decided to start with the Unicorn CPU emulator. It is a cpu only emulator and it doesn't emulate other hardware. Unicorn sources are built with cmake, which at first gave me a lot of headeach. But then I remembered goa which can build cmake apps. It was still a bit problematic since the emulator is library based and goa doesn't support libraries. I decided to link in my main file, so that the binary would be a standard executable.
After the build structure was sorted and I could try the emulator I realised that a lot of posix functionallity that the emulator relies on isn't in Genode. Lucky enough, most of those libc calls is for increased performance. So for now I disable them and that makes the emulator working.
Things like cache management needs to be solved, but right now I am happy with what I have.
A photo of 32bit ARM BBC BASIC:
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The next task in the list, integration , is all about how to interface riscos with Genode. I have plan which I will write about in my next blog.
So stay tuned, more will follow!