Nov 14, 2020
The Mu shell, compiling down to a subset of 32-bit x86 machine code, then to a Linux ELF binary, packaged up with just a Linux kernel and nothing else, running on a Linux console emulated on Qemu, on a Thinkpad T420s running 64-bit Linux.

Just another 27 million lines of C to take out (Linux kernel), and I'll have a decent computing stack.

A window showing Qemu running a copy of the Mu shell, in front of a window showing the Mu shell being compiled, the Linux kernel being compiled, and an ISO image being created.


I'm also thinking today about what it would take to fork Mu for the Raspberry Pi. It uses ARM processors, a 64-bit instruction since the Pi 3 which was released in 2015. The 64-bit ISA looks quite nice, but it's incompatible with the Pi 1 and Pi 2. Contrast x86, where 64-bit is quite compatible with 32-bit, but grotesque as a result, with bits for a register scattered across multiple bytes. So I might make the opposite choice to x86 and support just the 64-bit ISA. Thoughts?

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/den0024/a

This post is part of my Freewheeling Apps Devlog.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.

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