By the way you may be interested to read the following :)
From: Lars Bak larsbak@gunnestrup.dk Date: Tue Jan 28, 2003 9:56:12 AM Europe/Zurich To: Stephane Ducasse ducasse@iam.unibe.ch Subject: Re: Smalltalk VM
Hi Stephane, it is true we have a Smalltalk system that runs on the bare metal. VM + Basic libraries + TCP/IP stack is running in 128Kb of RAM. To ensure performance of blocks we have made a simple restriction. Blocks are LIFO (like Pascal procedures) and they cannot be assigned to object fields. Interestingly enough, this restriction has not been an obstacle what so ever. The advantage is block contexts can be stack allocated and thereby reduce pressure on the garbage collector.
Unfortunately, we are an early startup company and do not have material we can send you. Thanks for the interest, Lars Bak
P.S. I gave a talk at Aarhus University a month ago about our system. Please find the abstract attached.
OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE SYSTEMS RESEARCH SEMINAR
Lars Bak, OOVM:
Robust Embedded Software
Developing software for embedded systems has until now been very static. Source code, written in C, is compiled and linked on the development platform and the resulting binary image is transferred onto the device. In an industry where robustness is paramount and dynamic software updates are required this is simply not good enough. This presentation will describe a new approach to developing software for embedded devices. At the bottom of the software stack we have replaced the operating system with an object-oriented virtual machine. Scheduler, interrupt handlers, device drivers, networking code and application software are executing on top of this virtual machine. We will discuss some of the design decisions behind this dynamic, lean and mean system for embedded devices. The complete system occupies less than 128Kb. This approach solves many of the existing problems, allowing dynamic software updates and full serviceability.
We will conclude with a demonstration of the OOVM programming environment.
On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 02:34 PM, goran.hultgren@bluefish.se wrote:
Hi all!
A while ago around OOPSLA 2002 I think there was some talk about two impressive achievements - one really tiny kernel image by Dan Ingalls weighing in at a mere 246kb (if my memory serves) and one by Andreas Raab just a teeny bit larger.
Since I just got a silly challenge from my brother to whip up a small networking non-UI trivial app I thought it would have been cool to both use a minimal image and perhaps even go to the length of making a minimal VM for it. :-) Why? Well, because it could be cool to demo for all those Java-dudes demanding a ~9Mb JRE download. :-)
Perhaps Andreas or Dan or anyone else who knows anything could give us a status report?
regards, Göran
Prof. Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE (ducasse@iam.unibe.ch) http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/ "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes