nuttx - POSIX Uzebox?

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danboid
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nuttx - POSIX Uzebox?

Post by danboid »

I believe Uze has a retro computer OS in the works for the Uzebox, maybe he's just about ready to release it or maybe he's released it and I don't know about it but yesterday I was perusing the list of RTOS's on wikipedia, several of which support AVR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso ... ng_systems

I must admit I've not tried and I don't have any real use for most of these RTOS's, especially as they are unlikely to run on the Uzebox without some real effort to get the display etc working but I thought it was worth bringing the topic up on here anyway.

The most interesting one to me so far is nuttx which claims to support POSIX. I found an fm synth app for nuttx that sounds interesting but I presume it wouldn't work on the Uzebox without considerable effort, if at all, IF someone ported nuttx to the Uzebox, which might not be possible without swapping out the MCU for a slightly better ATMega?

https://nuttx.apache.org/

https://github.com/apache/nuttx
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: nuttx - POSIX Uzebox?

Post by D3thAdd3r »

For an OS, on audio, I think the vsync mixer makes most sense. Then it's PCM land, and you can generate whatever cycles allow. Probably not MP3, but 15khz 8 bit uncompressed from SD leaves many cycles left, and the SD is relatively huge. I think most OS ideas would imply SPI RAM being a necessity anyway?

I always thought porting such OSes would be harder than just aiming a bit lower and doing it custom from the ground up. GEOS is cool. I don't have experience at such, but I sure have dreamed of it over the years.

For me, a gimmicky little desktop and some cooperative multitasking, windows, and mouse support to control flashing of games, and perhaps a VM to run utilities to operate inside the desktop would be awesome.

Probably possible. If someone just bum rushed us with a working Uzebox OS all of a sudden...well, this would be beyond ideal 8-)
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danboid
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Re: nuttx - POSIX Uzebox?

Post by danboid »

D3thAdd3r wrote: Sat Feb 18, 2023 11:36 pm For an OS, on audio, I think the vsync mixer makes most sense. Then it's PCM land, and you can generate whatever cycles allow. Probably not MP3, but 15khz 8 bit uncompressed from SD leaves many cycles left, and the SD is relatively huge. I think most OS ideas would imply SPI RAM being a necessity anyway?

I always thought porting such OSes would be harder than just aiming a bit lower and doing it custom from the ground up. GEOS is cool. I don't have experience at such, but I sure have dreamed of it over the years.

For me, a gimmicky little desktop and some cooperative multitasking, windows, and mouse support to control flashing of games, and perhaps a VM to run utilities to operate inside the desktop would be awesome.

Probably possible. If someone just bum rushed us with a working Uzebox OS all of a sudden...well, this would be beyond ideal 8-)
I've only just seen this reply now somehow! I suspect that is exactly what is happening here.

Someone with infinite time, or even those with finite time too, should absolutely do a custom Uzebox GUI desktop from scratch based upon whatever the best open source AVR embedded OS we can find. We should probably try to dismiss nuttx first it seems. POSIX compat!?
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danboid
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Re: nuttx - POSIX Uzebox?

Post by danboid »

"“Zig has zig cc and zig c++, two commands that expose an interface flag-compatible with clang, allowing you to use the Zig compiler as a drop-in replacement for your existing C/C++ compiler.

...

Will Zig run on Bare Metal? Without an RTOS like NuttX?

Yep it can! Check out this project that runs Bare Metal Zig on the HiFive1 RISC-V board…

nmeum/zig-riscv-embedded

Can we build cross-platform Embedded Apps in Zig with GPIO, I2C, SPI, …?

We’re not quite there yet, but the Zig Embedded Group is creating a Common Interface and Hardware Abstraction Layer for Embedded Platforms…

...

Today we’re running incredibly complex C projects on NuttX…

Zig might be the best way to maintain and extend these IoT Projects on NuttX."

https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/zig#why-zig

NuttX for Embedded Linux Developers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huzhQrwJF4A
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