Re: Porting to different architectures

Richard Wallman
2006-07-31T15:35:11Z

Hans wrote:
> There are still a number of people on this list but most of us are in
> "screen saver" mode :-)

I've been following this project for about 7 years now, and it seems
like it regularly goes into "screen saver" mode. :(

> Porting ELKS to another (embedded) processor will definitely bring ELKS
> back to live (IMHO) but this is a huge and complicated task. Just
> changing the compiler from BCC to say Watcom is already a difficult task

I've been working on getting it to work with GCC for 386+ processors,
and it's not pretty. GCC support would make porting a lot easier, given
the number of processor targets it supports.

The next trick would be to remove some of the PC-specific stuff - not
all systems have a BIOS, for example. I keep meaning to dig out the old
laptop I was given (286 based Toshiba thing) and get a serial console
working. I'm still keen to get it running on my Psion 3C. :)

> (I have to admit I am a hardware designer :-).

May come in useful... :)

> I am pretty sure that one of us can email you the latest source files

The SourceForge CVS server works, it's just the download instructions on
the site that are wrong.

If you replace "anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net" with
"anonymous@elks.cvs.sourceforge.net" it all works well.

There doesn't seem to be any of the project admins (the ones with the
CVS SSH key) awake ATM - I was going to see if I could get a copy of the
key so that *someone* could commit changes! Failing that, I would
(reluctantly) have to fork the project just to keep things moving.

So, project admins - anyone awake?

--
Richard Wallman