Inferno on Microcontrollers

Last year I looked at microcontrollers a fair amount, though you probably wouldn't see much activity related to that if you follow these updates. If there was any obvious public activity at all, it was happening in the diary I occasionally update about Inferno-related things. Things went off-track when some initial explorations of Inferno on a Thumb-2 microcontroller ended in frustration, leading me back to writing bare metal code instead, and this indirectly resulted in an organiser application written in a simple language for the Ben NanoNote. As the year drew to a close, I picked up Inferno again and started to make some progress, resulting in something more concrete to show.

Meanwhile, long-time Inferno explorer, Caerwyn, has been investigating a port to the Raspberry Pi Pico. Last year also saw the publication of a thesis about porting Inferno OS to a Cortex-M7 device. Hopefully there are other ports in progress, or there will be new ones that develop once people find out about these efforts.

While it's a challenge to get a useful system running on these resource-constrained devices, it's a rewarding experience to be able to show something that works on at least a basic level. It's also interesting to see a Unix-like system running on something that might be expected to only run low-level, bare metal code.

Categories: Inferno, Limbo, Free Software

This document is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.