Hey Tim,

Tim wrote:
> Exactly. Not to mention that writing a tcp/ip stack
> is a bit of a labour. Why not use one that has
> already been written and tested? That's why I tend
> to think that using the OSKit is a good idea. It
> allows use of linux device drivers and so on.
> Big savings in effort. SqueakNOS is an excellent
> project using this approach.

Actually, we took exactly the opposite approach. Not
the OSKit or Linux approach. We've implemented all the
drivers in Squeak. We're handling interrupts (all of
them, except the clock IRQ) in Squeak, via a Semaphore
that is signaled in a generic IRQ handler in the VM.
We've implemented drivers for the serial port,
keyboard and PS/2 mouse. We have classes with names
like PIC8259 (the Programmable Interrupt Controller),
PCKeyboard, UART8250, UART16550, etc. This is crazy, I
know, it's a lot of fun. It is great to be able to
speak directly to the hardware objects from Squeak,
sending them messages and making it crash sometimes :)

It's funny that you mention the project of writing a
TCP/IP stack in Smalltalk from scratch. I've been
doing exactly that in my spare time, and it works, or
kind of (ARP, IP and UDP are working fine, and TCP is
almost there, but with no fany stuff like delayed
ACKs). We implemented SLIP over the UART8250 and were
able to ping SqueakNOS from a Linux box.

But please don't compare this homegrown OS to the
Interval SqueakOS. We're four or five persons (from
Argentina) working on our spare time, and the last
time we got together to do put some work on SqueakNOS
was like 6 o 8 months ago.

Cheers,
Luciano.-

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