ruslan

Exceptionally good reading!

Get two FTDI FT232RL chips, connect them together on serial side (RXD->TXD, TXD->RXD, GND<->GND). Plug into USB ports of your computers, run terminals (or any other software that supports serial I/O), send/receive data. Can use XYZModem to send files, PPP for TCP/IP networking, etc. No programming involved. Cheap as hell.

No pointers ?

Right. But I would still prefer markdown file format, so I could simply open it in web browser. :)

How about social.md which is gpg signed ?

Nice reading. But...

> And of course, we must defeat git.

What's wrong with this guy and Git ?

How does F8 compare to RV16 in terms of resources (die size) used and performance ?

You don't need that much of energy to keep CMOS memory and RTC clock running. The battery will self-discharge way before it's exhausted by the load. IMHO.

Supercaps don't not leak and do not require to be changed regularily. Yes, offline time on supercap would be small, a couple of months, but for a machine which is used often that is not a problem.

Why not use a 5F/5V supercapacitor, DGH505Q5R5 or anything alike ? You may need to solder a 10R current reducing resistor in series.

Still not possible to use same sketch for extruding multiple solids. :( I used to this feature in F360 a lot.

Lattice's FPGAs are very nice. With an iCE40 you can have a full featured RISC-V soft-core (RV32IMFAC) at some 80 MHz.

What are the requirements for this OS ? Will it run on synthesizable RISC-V core with 512K SRAM ?

> In modern times the closest we have to Inferno is Android, which traces back to Bell Labs original goal to target Inferno against Sun's Java efforts on the market.

That's interesting, I never looked on Android at that angle. Still, Android is based on Linux (Unix), it allows JIT and NDK. Whereas Inferno does not allow escape from VM conceptually, and the whole OS, except low-level stuff, is written in Limbo and works totally in VM.

I once tried Inferno somewhere in 1998 on my PC, played with it a litte and removed. But three years later I met it in Lucent/Definity Avaya PSTN switches the company I worked for bought. Not to say I was surprised. :-)

This Uxn thing reminds me Inferno[1] - a VM based operating system from Bell Labs with its own programming language, GUI and networking protocol. It can run on may hardware with just 1 MB of RAM. But Inferno is far more than that, it's a Plan9's descendant.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

I've thought a little bit more about this case and came to conclusion that to mitigate this attack paging agorimths can be improved by using redundancy and CRC checks with not too much overhead. Yet it takes a lot of work and investment, so it won't happen any time soon. Yes we are safe for now.

AFAIC, reflashing BIOS won't give you anything, you need to sign it first with proper private key which is checked by the CPU hardware before execution begins. This EMI trick fools CPU itself and I cannot see how it can be fixed, unless new paging algorithm is invented.

It seems to me the mentioned "Principles of Operation" document describes a virtal machine compatible with good old System/370 what's now known as IBM z/Architecture. But the Telum CPU itself runs on Power10 cores or alike RISCs.

Has anybody noticed that malformed vsetvli instruction is using x0 register as destination (returning vl to be used by app) which in most RISCs is hard-wired zero. Very unlikely that writing to zero reg was not tested during design verification process as it's one of the obvious corner cases.

Does this boot procedure work with EFI/UEFI ? If so, does UEFI supervisor emulate swithing real/protected/long modes or does it go in real hardware ?

Although sending program to display is extremely dangerous idea, it seems it's inevitable. The next "DisplayPort" will receive byte-code to render picture, but not the pircture itself as it is right now.

Knowing about Fidonet is too much. But a little bit of UUCP definitely won't hurt. ;)

Excellent find!

The user should have consulted HN before diving into the problem. :)

Did not know that. Indeed it's very useful. Thank you!

U-Boot supports Zmodem ?

You are right, but it's possible to connect RS-422 to RS-232 using just proper wiring [1]. Basically, same three wires and one loop wire for RX+ to ground. It's not reliable and not recommended, but works and would solve the problem. :-)

1. https://stratusengineering.com/rs232-rs422485-conversion-cab...

The faxing program you were using should have a terminal feature which was used to setup modem and to dial BBSes. :)

Yes, you can transfer files via COM port in MS-DOS using COPY command, but errors may occur. :) Also you have to switch port to 8-bit binary mode and turn off flow control. Don't remember how to do that exactly. Default was 7 bit XON/XOFF, AFAIR.

There are plenty of mini-DIN connectors and serial cables for mac on ebay.

You need just three wires for serial line to work. I would strip the wires and plug them in without any connector. :)

I think in this particular (macbook) case the problem was lack of proper software. Yet, I recall if there was modem installed, a terminal software had to be present as well.