SqueakOS

johnm at wdi.disney.com johnm at wdi.disney.com
Mon Nov 16 18:24:03 UTC 1998


Jerry Bell <jdbell at fareselaw.com> wrote:
> What would be the ideal kind of kernel to run Squeak on top of?  I know
> portability would be on the top of the list.  How about single vs.
> multithreaded? Maybe even something completely different to take advantage
> of the unique needs of a smalltalk environment?  

Squeak doesn't really need an OS, just device drivers. The minimum it
needs are a display driver and some combination of pen/mouse/keyboard
input drivers. It doesn't really even need a file system, although it's nice
to have. After that, it just depends on what you need: sound output, sound
input, networking (TCP/IP), etc.

Curtis Wickman, a summer intern, ported Squeak to a bare Mitsubishi
M32-R/D prototyping board (no OS) in about six weeks, including writing
all the device drivers. It took him a few more weeks to add a simple Flash RAM
file system and a sound output driver. The entire VM, including the drivers, was
under 250 KBytes.

So my approach to building a bare-machine Squeak would be to find
an open-source OS kernel and just adapt its device drivers. Squeak is really
its own OS, after all.

	-- John

P.S. I know about the Interval and Mitsubishi bare-chip Squeak's. Are there
any other bare-chip VM's out there? (The DEC Itsy and Zaurus ports are neat,
but they run on top of a host OS.)





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