100% open (or almost open) platform for hobby OS development
Re: 100% open (or almost open) platform for hobby OS develop
Has there ever been an OpenRISC chip produced?
Re: 100% open (or almost open) platform for hobby OS develop
This is actually something I've been interested in developing for years. Well, not specifically for OSdev, but just in general.
I'm a big fan of SPARC, and SPARC seems to be the most open friendly ISA, so I'd be using LEON, a completely open source VHDL implementation of SPARC32 v8
For graphics, I agree that it is best to generalize do it in software instead. There is an open so-called GPGPU on github which looks very promising. There's also an open source Cray-1 implementation (although this is nowhere near fast enough).
Getting an FPGA big enough to fit all of this would be quite a task though.
I'm a big fan of SPARC, and SPARC seems to be the most open friendly ISA, so I'd be using LEON, a completely open source VHDL implementation of SPARC32 v8
For graphics, I agree that it is best to generalize do it in software instead. There is an open so-called GPGPU on github which looks very promising. There's also an open source Cray-1 implementation (although this is nowhere near fast enough).
Getting an FPGA big enough to fit all of this would be quite a task though.
Re: 100% open (or almost open) platform for hobby OS develop
If you'd rather develop for x86 (since there tends to be better resources for doing so), the "86Duino" board might be good platform to target. It's based on a Vortex86EX SoC, which is well-documented. The supplied firmware is based on FreeDOS (but it'll boot any OS from a mini-SD card) and full source to the Ardino-like runtime environment is available and relatively easy to follow (so getting things like GPIO to work from a custom OS should be pretty simple).
The only downsides are the lack of built-in video output (although mini-PCIe video cards do exist and would work, alternatively, an Arduino-compatible LCD module could be used) and the relatively low specifications (300Mhz i686, 128MB RAM).
There's also the Intel Galileo board, which is similar (400Mhz i586, 256MB RAM), but is a bit more expensive and seems to have a somewhat more complex architecture.
The only downsides are the lack of built-in video output (although mini-PCIe video cards do exist and would work, alternatively, an Arduino-compatible LCD module could be used) and the relatively low specifications (300Mhz i686, 128MB RAM).
There's also the Intel Galileo board, which is similar (400Mhz i586, 256MB RAM), but is a bit more expensive and seems to have a somewhat more complex architecture.
