[Oberon] FPGA - Save / Restore OBERON.FS

[Jörg]

Hi Wojtek

This question has more to do with the speed of the RAM instead of the size
of the RAM.
To keep the Verilog code for the CPU simple, fast static RAM was used.
If you want to use slower but larger RAM you need to put quite a bit of
intelligence in your RAM access in the Verilog code.

I'm more the Oberon coder and not the Verilog FPGA coder. Magnus is perhaps
more competent to answer this question...

br
Jörg


-----Original Message-----
From: Skulski, Wojciech [mailto:skulski at pas.rochester.edu] 
Sent: Donnerstag, 20. April 2017 17:41
To: joerg.straube at iaeth.ch; ETH Oberon and related systems
<oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch>; 'Andreas Pirklbauer'
<andreas_pirklbauer at yahoo.com>
Subject: RE: [Oberon] FPGA - Save / Restore OBERON.FS

Joerg:

  thank you for the explanation. I am fully aware that the 2013 Project
Oberon was an exercise in frugality, partly for its own sake, and partly
because the Digilent board had only 1 MB of RAM and no more. Going beyond
this frugal system will require more resources, and in particular more RAM.

Here is the question: how much RAM would be needed to implement a richer
system running under RISC5? FYI, I designed two variations of such a board.
One has 2 MB of ZBT RAM, and the other has 128 MB of SDRAM. I can make the
schematics and the layout available of either one, or both. 

Thank you,
Wojtek
________________________________________
From: Oberon [oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] on behalf of Jörg
[joerg.straube at iaeth.ch]
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2017 10:53 AM
To: 'ETH Oberon and related systems'; 'Andreas Pirklbauer'
Subject: Re: [Oberon] FPGA - Save / Restore OBERON.FS

Wojtek

ProjectOberon is meant to teach how a RISC CPU works, how to write a
compiler for this CPU and what is needed for a basic operating system (file
system, memory allocation, keyboard driver, mouse driver, display diver,
fonts, module loading, background jobs as simple concept of multitasking).
Even a text editor is part of ProjectOberon.
And this OS including the applications should fit in only 1 MB of RAM!
For reasons of simplicity the design of the Oberon file system used in
ProjectOberon is rather simple. It was not the intention to re-code FAT nor
NTFS as part of ProjectOberon.
Most probably the code for one of those file systems alone would eat up a
large amount of the memory :-)
If we used those files systems, we would also need additional code for the
partition table (MBR or GPT). This is all doable but not part of
ProjectOberon right out-of-the-box.

A2/Bluebottle is a totally different kind of beast (although it's fully
written in Oberon) as it's more a kind of full blown OS (USB support,
Ethernet and IP support, multitasking... obviously needing much more memory)
The ProjectOberon emulator on Mac does not have the mentioned limits as it
uses the native MacOS to store files.

br
Jörg

-----Original Message-----
From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Skulski,
Wojciech
Sent: Donnerstag, 20. April 2017 14:41
To: Andreas Pirklbauer <andreas_pirklbauer at yahoo.com>; ETH Oberon and
related systems <oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch>
Subject: Re: [Oberon] FPGA - Save / Restore OBERON.FS

>There will be an enhanced Oberon file system in Experimental Oberon
offering, amongst other things, larger file sizes.

Fantastic. Will it be possible to use entire multi-gigabit SD cards? Will it
be possible to read these under Windows or Linux? Ideally, either of these
would see the SD like its own file system. CIFS, ext2/3, or whatever
similar. Is it possible?

Wojtek

________________________________________


> From: Skulski, Wojciech skulski at pas.rochester.edu
> Sent: Thu Apr 20 06:42:54 CEST 2017

> My biggest concern about Oeron FS is its limited size.

> Wojtek

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