[Oberon] Interfacing with Foreign Systems

[Guy T.]

I don’t think it’s a good idea of looking at ProjectOberon to build a kind of full blown OS with all the complexity related to it.There is already other solutions available (read Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc.). Running ProjectOberon for what it is, a simple OS with a very attractive (different) user interface than what we are used too with other system is the key. Using an FPGA based computer is attractive for the ones who need it for it’s real potential (educational or industrial). Independent of the underneath hardware platform, the ProjectOberon software part of it possesses it's own merit to get it available on a commercial board, even for educational purposes (software-wise). A limited amount of changes would be required if an hardware abstraction layer is built under it to facilitate its eventual port on other platforms. Augmenting its availability using easy to get hardware seems to me to be an interesting avenue, “stealing" the drivers already available somewhere else to access the hardware… I already made that point before so I won’t add on it.

Guy

>The Oberon OS as it exists for RISC5 today is in my point too limited to build a good starting point for a native OS on any commercial HW board.
>Just one example: the SW architecture for HW drivers  (if you can speak of an architecture at all) is too slim and too static. There is Kernel (driving timer, clock and disk), Input (driving mouse and keyboard) and Display (driving the screen)
>The existing APIs do not allow to change the keyboard layout, nor to change the resolution.
>
>At least a FAT16/LFN filesystem implementation, a TCP/IP API and an USB API should be part of a „modern“ OS. As these protocols are complex beasts, I could imagine that coding those will need quite some memory. Perhaps too big for the 1MB my FPGA board currently has.
>
>But indeed running ProjectOberon natively on a RasPi would be nice😊.
>
>br
>Jörg