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Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI

100 pointsposted 11 hours ago

by rickcarlino

(asciinema.org)

40 Comments

throw0101c

9 hours ago

Ah, Forth-as-BIOS. Memories of Sun SPARC (and Apple PowerPC):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

* https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Open_Firmware

davidw

9 hours ago

No reference in those articles to the open firmware song? Pity...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Wyvb9GotM

DonHopkins

7 hours ago

    : OpenFirmwareSong ( - ♬ )
        \ By Mitch Bradley.
        \ Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones".
        𝄞
        ." Firmware" cr
        ." Open Firmware" cr
        ." It's the appropriate technology," cr
        ." Features" cr
        ." FCode booting" cr
        ." Hierarchical DevInfo tree." cr
        ." Hack Forth" cr
        ." Using Emacs on the keys," cr
        ." Save in" cr
        ." NVRAM if you please." cr
        𝄒 cr
        ." With your" cr
        ." Open Firmware" cr
        ." You can fix the bugs in no time" cr
        ." Bring the kernel up in no time" cr
        ." We'll have an FCode time!" cr
        𝄒 cr
        \ Thank you and good night!
        reboot
    ;

DonHopkins

7 hours ago

When Mitch Bradley put OpenFirmware on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), he implemented this easter egg:

>You may be amused to know that the firmware has an Easter Egg of the Conway's Life. If you press the rocker pad (left side of screen) to the right after powering on, you will get a randomly-select amusement, one of which is Life. It uses the traditional life-death rule with a wrap-around field, and initial conditions that result in a fairly long number of generations before steady-state. Specificially, the initial state is a glider gun and an R-pentomino. The pentomino evolution eventually wrecks the gun, but things get pretty wild for awhile as gliders wrap around and interact with the debris from the pentomino. It almost stabilizes several times, but then something will set off another burst of activity for awhile before it finally dies out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21049568

DonHopkins on Sept 23, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (...

That's Mitch Bradley's Open Firmware Forth, which was also on Suns, post-NuBus PowerPC Macs, Pegasos, and IBM Power Systems!

I used to call it "L1-A Forth", because that's the Forth you got when you pressed "L1-A" on a Sun keyboard to get into the boot monitor. He also made a great version of that Forth system with a metacompiler that ran under Unix (Forthmacs), which I used a lot.

https://github.com/MitchBradley

https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

https://web.archive.org/web/20121119070656/https://elinux.or...

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0

https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689282

>Mitch Bradley came up with a nice way to refactor the Forth compiler/interpreter and control structures, so that you could use them immediately at top level! Traditional FORTHs only let you use IF, DO, WHILE, etc in : definitions, but they work fine at top level in Mitch's Forths (including CForth and Open Firmware).

More about Mitch and OpenFirmware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810

https://web.archive.org/web/20090920123423/http://radian.org...

>And lest you think this is some kind of Apple-paid rant, I'll mention Mitch Bradley. Have you read the story of Mel, the "real" programmer? Mitch is that guy, in 2008. Firmware superhacker, author of the IEEE Open Firmware standard, wrote the firmware that Sun shipped on its machines for a good couple of decades, and in general one of the few people I've ever had the pleasure of working with whose technical competence so inordinately exceeds mine that I feel I wouldn't even know how to start catching up. Mitch's primary laptop runs Windows.

kragen

32 minutes ago

How do if, do, and while work at top level in Mitch's Forths? I've been thinking about different ways to achieve that.

kragen

10 hours ago

Ilo/Konilo is pretty cool, but I already knew that. What I didn't know about was qemu-system -nographic.

Any idea why crc is specifying a custom BIOS image? QEMU comes with a default one, right? Questions like these make me wish asciinema supported recording voiceovers.

I'm guessing that the slow text screen updates are some kind of an artifact of unoptimized UEFI implementation, and/or QEMU, because I'm pretty sure Konilo is a lot snappier than this running under Linux, even though the Ilo implementation is not a highly optimized virtual machine.

coolcoder613

2 hours ago

There are actually two similar options, one is -nographic, which simply shows the serial terminal, and the other is -display curses, which will show the VGA text mode console on the terminal.

kragen

27 minutes ago

I suspect that for my purposes both of them will be useful. Thank you! I should go back and read the QEMU man page; groff -man -Tpdf <(gzip -dc /usr/share/man/man1/qemu-system.1.gz) generates a PDF of only 68 pages.

crc_

10 hours ago

I'm not well versed in qemu's various options. When I didn't specify a BIOS image, it seems to be using SeaBIOS, not UEFI, and hangs on "Booting from Hard Disk...". I should be able to start doing proper videos soon; I've been slowly working towards that.

I can say that the display & overall performance is noticeably faster on the two actual computers I tested on than under qemu on my Linux system.

kragen

10 hours ago

Thanks!

It makes sense that it would default to using SeaBIOS; QEMU has a lot of options whose defaults were more reasonable 20 years ago.

yjftsjthsd-h

8 hours ago

This is a minor pet peeve of mine, actually. I would understand if qemu defaulted to BIOS booting, though I'd prefer that it try UEFI then fall back to BIOS/CSM at this point, but it's actively difficult to do UEFI on qemu; you have to actively feed it the ROM by path, and last I tried you had to include a -pflash for writable storage even if you weren't doing anything with it (thankfully this appears to have been fixed). I really wish they just let you do something like -boot-firmware=uefi,bios or such. (And again, in 2025 I really think UEFI should just be the default, with fallback to CSM/BIOS for backwards compat)

pm215

4 hours ago

The countervailing force here is the desire for command line backwards compatibility. Every time you change a default to be something that makes more sense today, you break the existing working setups of some unknown number of people...

The approach the project has settled on is to say that providing user friendly defaults should be the job of a "management layer" piece of software like libvirt, and QEMU proper should concentrate on providing flexible and orthogonal options which that other software can use to tell it what to do.

yjftsjthsd-h

an hour ago

Does qemu make an effort to preserve backwards compatibility with its cli? Because I have distinct memories of getting caught by them changing the way multiple parts of their command line work.

But in this case, my suggestions should be fairly backwards compatible; retaining the default of BIOS but adding a simple `--firmware uefi` option would change nothing for existing users, and even defaulting to `--firmware uefi,bios` should be mostly compatible since it just tries UEFI and then promptly falls back to BIOS.

kragen

22 minutes ago

Pretty sure they do, but I agree that adding `--firmware uefi` would be fine.

kragen

8 hours ago

Maybe we should have new command names with defaults that are reasonable this decade, keeping qemu-system-i386 and the like for backwards compatibility?

yjftsjthsd-h

8 hours ago

Like apt vs apt-get? Yeah, I could potentially go for that. Although in the case of qemu I'm not entirely convinced that we need to go that far because I think it would only take small tweaks to make the existing tool friendlier.

kragen

7 hours ago

Yeah, exactly.

I don't think you can make those small tweaks without breaking tens of thousands of users' production setups which depend on those defaults.

deivid

9 hours ago

you probably should set the serial port speed

kragen

8 hours ago

Oh, I didn't realize -nographic was using a serial port. That's probably why it's slow!

ddingus

2 hours ago

It may default to 9600... tons of devices will fall back to that, given no other instruction

kragen

27 minutes ago

Yeah, that was my inference. It looked like about 9600.

oersted

10 hours ago

A Forth-like command-line shell (bash replacement) does sound quite interesting actually, particularly if the stack is displayed on the side and is not implicit.

It's rather concise, most functions tend to be a single short line. Its syntax is minimal (or non-existent according to some), it's just flat white-space separated tokens. It has imperative/interactive semantics, in the sense that every successive word makes some changes on the current state (the stack).

All of this makes it quite amenable to be used as an OS shell I think, it seems obvious in retrospect.

The idea of starting with an empty Forth and creating a whole universe of automations and DSLs for your system, one command at a time, is quite pleasing, in a purist sense, although perhaps not entirely practical.

Does such a shell exist? Not as minimal as Ilo, one you can actually use in a modern system instead of bash and the like, ideally with a nice display of the stack. Probably Factor is the most appropriate Forth-like to build it on, it already has a good REPL mode, it would mainly involve adding a bunch of utilities for practical command-line use.

crc_

9 hours ago

For RetroForth, I have a new interface under development that may be somewhat like this. A screenshot can be seen at https://imgur.com/a/z4jhq6e

I use RetroForth as a working environment on Unix [mostly OpenBSD & FreeBSD], with an (unreleased) userland written in it, along with some use of external standard utilities. I'm still working on improvements around chaining programs via a pipe-like structure, but it's been my main environment apart from Konilo for a few years now.

Nevermark

8 hours ago

Your sidebar reminds me of the computer I learned to program on. A TRS-80 Model III.

I went through a short period of figuring out interesting peek/poke memory addresses for modifying the BASIC system, and found the "80" used as the scroll width. Setting that to 60 allowed me to create a non-scrolling status sidebar like that for my first programs/games.

It strikes me that it would have been great to have had a Forth machine back then. That early version of BASIC didn't have a (language accessible) stack! Not even a return address stack, aka GOSUB. So I used strings as a stack to implement a small text adventure parser. (And later, on a computer with graphics pixels, I used BASIC strings as a heap for defining and drawing simple 3D vector objects.) Then I learned Pascal.

Desperate times. Desperate measures. But Forth would have been great.

kragen

9 hours ago

One of the most useful ways to use Forth is as a command-line shell for scripting assembly-language primitives on a small computer, like, 64KiB of RAM or less. (Ilo has 64KiB of RAM, IIRC.)

crc_

4 hours ago

64kW of RAM @ a 4 byte (32-bit) word size, so 256KiB of actual RAM for the applications running on ilo.

For a reference, the 8088 build needs a bit more than that to account for stacks, the VM code, drivers, and memory needed for the actual hardware. (Around 384KiB physical RAM on an 8088/8086 works well from my testing, but I've tested with 285-320KiB in non-standard configurations under a few emulation targets).

kragen

3 hours ago

Sorry! I appreciate the correction. I forgot that it was word-oriented.

delaminator

8 hours ago

The BBC Micro had / has a ROM so you can boot straight into it.

https://www.acornelectron.co.uk/info/electron/acornsoft_adde...

I still have mine

kjs3

2 hours ago

There was also the Jupiter Ace[1], which was sorta a Sinclair ZX with Forth in ROM.

[1] https://www.jupiter-ace.co.uk/

rpcope1

4 hours ago

Honestly I've experimented with doing something basically like this doing a bunch of modifications to zforth and using it on RP2040 and RP2350 and it actually works really nicely. It's amazing the functionality you can fit down onto those MCUs basically building an old school computer with a Forth interface like the Canon Cat was.

    IPMI - standard
    DRAC - Dell
    iLOM - Sun/Oracle
    iLO - HP
    IMM - IBM

p_l

7 hours ago

  BMC - vendor neutral
  RedFish - Current DMTF standard replacing IPMI
  ALOM - sometimes encountered in the wild as part of iLO :O
  HMC - IBM on non-x86 systems (except OpenPower), not compatible with anything else
  RSA - used to be IBM
  IMC - Cisco

buildbot

8 hours ago

XSCF - Fujitsu/Oracle SPARC

(I wonder how they got that acronym)