[Oberon] Sizes of compilers & etc.

[Peter Matthias]

Am 19.03.23 um 17:05 schrieb Liam Proven:

> The RasPi is not ideal, I know, because it has some many-megabyte
> proprietary RTOS underneath. But I think there would be much
> educational value in being able to show students a $5 to $10 computer
> with a complete OS, with rudimentary Internet access (over Ethernet at
> least), which was small enough for them to read and study in its
> entirety.

I think you haven't bought Raspberries for a while ;-)

> (The RasPi Zero and Zero W are that cheap. I think the Pi Pico is too
> small to run even Oberon. It has 264 kB of RAM and 2MB of Flash, which
> is less than a Ceres workstation 30 years ago.)

There are versions with 8MB Flash. As the Pico can run code from Flash,
I think it would be possible, but too limited. Also for ARM, there are 3
different instruction sets. Thumb-2, ARM32 and ARM64. Only ARM32 has
open source Oberon compilers.

> A 1GB Pi 3 would be a capable computer with A2.
>
> There are no other small FOSS OSes that are _that_ small and simple.

With Oberon-V, I am doing something very similar for RISC-V embedded
controllers. See http://oberon.wikidot.com/project-oberon-v . FreeRTOS
should be allowed to be used at least in cooperative multitasking mode.
This simplifies loading a lot. Size of Bootloader written in C for
FreeRTOS on RISC-V is over 200k. Size of Bootloader for Linux written in
Oberon is 2.7k...

Peter