asciilifeform: ftr i want to see x86 and arm die , properly, and cremated, they belong in same place as winblows. srsly wtf, picture 'alphabet' of 700 symbols, that's x86..
asciilifeform: interestingly, the use of flammable refrigerants was specifically banned in building codes. errywhere. holdover from early 1900s. today -- amended, and... mandatory
asciilifeform: brittle kind, like mcfood containers.
asciilifeform: meanwhile, in envirowhinerism noose : asciilifeform uncrated a 'window' type air conditioner to help in torture room; and found 1) cost ~2x than last time bought one 2) plastered with 'explosion hazard' warnings. apparently europistan banned ~all~ freons, new-type, old type, and as result EVERYONE gets cooling compressors fulla... butane. 3) internal insulation is... styrofoam. the white,☝︎☟︎
asciilifeform: interesting architectural approach, also, 2 cpu, 1 runs a unixlike, the other -- a handwritten asm thing that actually talks to the iron, and presents self as 'iron' to the unixturd
asciilifeform: incidentally, seems like asciilifeform is not the 1st or the 100th to think of this : turned up that in ru, from early 2000s, and entirely unrelated to the hyped 'elbrus' & co, they've been making rad-hard realtime box 'baget' on mips1.
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-07-17#1923088 << the circular situation of gnat , where 'need gnat to build gnat', is the third reason for the mips approach -- arch with 100 fixed-length instructions, simplify the eventual rewriting of backend so can ditch gcc dep.☝︎☟︎
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-07-17#1923078 << fwiw good % of the 'working moving parts' of usa work on these. e.g. certain insurance co's, other items personally witnessed. 'where is the proggy' 'right here, runs vt100 emu, connects to ibm360 downstairs'☝︎
asciilifeform: in principle 'anything possible' ; recall german gun 'bertha', 'dora', etc. series. 3000 men, 400 camp whores, however many technicians, 4 railroad tracks, battalion of railroad engineers to lay track in front of it so can move... but in what sense is 'field' artillery.☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: the other variant is to do a la trb, genesis e.g. 3.70.16 (arbitrary, happens to be what i had around during 1st test) and ~then~ cut, a la trb. but it is gargantuan , would make trb genesis look microscopic in comparison, viewing the genesis patch in e.g. phf's viewer will prolly crash most www browser..
asciilifeform: ( 'them' being tmsr-mips-kernel and tmsrmips.asm )
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: currently thinking, oughta genesis'em together. ( and at same time snip out errything from kernel that aint relevant to the sim-arch. ) and ~then~ if someone thinks he absolutely must sit down said kernel on some other irons , ~he~ can then put back the necessary routines.
asciilifeform: absolutely must, there's no other way to properly civilize it
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: had same thought re that kernel patch -- wtf to do with it, it aint a vpatch, nao need genesis of kernel, so then which, etc
asciilifeform: from asciilifeform's pov, this is actually gold standard for correctness. and if i find myself ~liking~ + agreeing, then suspicious, 'is argument really solid'
asciilifeform: that 4ghz clock of 'modern' pc, is burned up mostly on liquishit.
asciilifeform: properly-trimmed linux userland , i suspect , would run entirely usably in 'tmsr mips'-on-ice40.
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: i suspect this hypothesis extends just the same to iron.
asciilifeform: the current kernel is <2MB. and prolly trimmable further. boot to shell in 3sec or so.☟︎
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: imho after working mipstron, whoever actually needs heathenware for whatever experiment, can house it in a mipsjail and be done with it.☝︎
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: doesn't require hand-hexing, since trb actually stores all blox, simply needs re-walk trigger
asciilifeform did write some experimental patches, and they were marked with jolly roger, and certainly aint about to recommend'em to anyone who does not consciously know wtf he's doing, much less hand-hold to install..
asciilifeform: esp. for safety-critical component that is wallet.
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: unrelated, i found 1 of your belarus tomb folx, comment in mod queue.
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: rk and dulap 4.x , but heavily hand-cut. ( and i suspect can be cut further still . ) i dun operate kernels other than hand-cut.
asciilifeform: ( i expect one can use any whatsoever. my patch will only cleanly work with 2.6+, 2.4.x had very different api for deviceisms )
asciilifeform: kernels, however, no hard limit found yet, erry 3.x seems to work (with my patch)
asciilifeform: and 4.8.1 appears to be the last gcc w/ properly-behaving mips1 backend.
asciilifeform: however it only provides 'uclibc' (and not musl, as prev. noted.)☟︎
asciilifeform: ftr the last version of buildroot that does 100% Right Thing (i.e. built working kernel + userland) is 2013.08-rc1 .
asciilifeform: ( how ? e.g. 'b _end_cycle if $r9==0xdeadf00d' will stop when 'program counter' reg of mips is equal to 0xdeadf00d', then single-step to see what instr dispatched... then 'i r' and see regs. etc )
asciilifeform: ( pretty gnarly, incidentally, had to debug crashed kernels using ~pc host~'s gdb, as there is no dedicated debuggism in the 12kB emu thing, it'd massively slow down execution just by existing)
asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: i expect it'll be somewhat easier than the piece already done.
asciilifeform: ( in the 3 'byte r/w' instructions, nowhere else )
asciilifeform: if switch to 'little', you will get a roughly 0.01% speedup, all it'll do it get rid of the xor addr, 0x3 instr.
asciilifeform: ( fwiw the posted prototype has selectable endianism, albeit via an 'ifdefism' . thus far only tested with 'bigendian' kernel + userland tho. )
asciilifeform: so apparently orig cmips d00d was not to blame for this oddity.
asciilifeform: ts ), and so dun matter how the instrs are represented, from user's pov
asciilifeform: btw for thread-completeness -- the 'weird-endian' puzzle had simple answer : turns out the mips arch uses 'little' representation for the instructions per se, even on 'big' machine. the rationale for this, was that the instr. length is fixed, and jumps into unaligned addresses are forbidden (i.e. iron will not load an instruction from an addr that doesn't end with 2 (on 64bit -- 3) zero bi☝︎
asciilifeform: and you can plug'em into virtually any box, from 'vax' to 'pogo', all you need is a serial port of whatever description.
asciilifeform: single-phosphour crt, w/out shadow mask. hence razor-sharp ( and actually why bolix made the lispm console a b&w tube. was only way to get 1280x1024 in 1980s tube, with sharp text) . for this reason asciilifeform for many years had actual glass tty, when first started unixing, was 1 of the best junkyard finds ever imho
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-07-17#1922941 << afaik all the airlines still are using the ~physically same~ ibm mainframes as in 1990. ( simply, in 'civilized' world, the agents run 'terminal' proggy under microshit. whereas in orclands, ye olde ibm glass terminals. i saw one in e.g. argentina, in coupla places )☝︎☟︎
asciilifeform: ( has a couple of other up-sides, e.g., 'endianism' only affects 3 instructions. so can be made selectable. )
asciilifeform: it dun even ~have~ to be mips, i picked it cuz it is the 'smallest' , moving-parts-wise, arch, for which there was existing gcc back-end.
asciilifeform: when you have a ~defined~ iron, can lose 99% of the driverism crapolade.
asciilifeform: 'iron babel' is imho good chunk of why linux is ball o'shit.
asciilifeform: the incident where i glued together rk pilot plant, to only ~then~ find out that nobody knows when the fuck proper gnat will actually build arm binaries w/ working threading, was instructive.☟︎
asciilifeform: re 'lunapark cars' -- the rationale for the mips experiment is only half 'make honest vps for piz', other half is 'make reproducible linuxable iron'☝︎
