[Haskell-cafe] Does GHC 7.8 make targeting bare metal ARM any easier?

[Magnus Therning]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 08:05:04AM +0100, Karel Gardas wrote:
> 
> Hello Jeremy,
> 
> I'd also like to see GHC compiling for ARM bare metal. Honestly
> speaking I've avoided Raspberry Pi, but rather settled on ARMv7.
> Side note: BeagleBone is excellent for this as you get all the TI
> supported tools together with JTAG debugging just for free from TI
> (including ARM compilers if you care about this) and also you get
> full documentation for its Sitara 335x SoC.
> 
> Anyway, back to the GHC topic. I find it too invasive to go straight
> from POSIX/libc dependency to nothing on bare-metal. Instead of this
> while analyzing the situation for myself I've rather settled on
> POSIX RTOS which is much less weight that general purpose Linux
> distro and yet it provides a lot of API which makes GHC RTS porting
> work much easier.
> 
> So as my hobby time permits I'm working on GHC port to RTEMS[1]
> which is a single-process, multi-threaded RTOS with POSIX API
> supported. On its devel mailing list you may find that Raspberry Pi
> BSP was already submitted for inclusion. Generally speaking, I also
> hope that since this work is much less invasive on GHC, it has
> higher chance of a merge into GHC HEAD once ready...

This is exactly what I've been telling my colleagues (who like me
mostly are stuck working with C on embedded devices) is what we
*really* ought to be doing. :)

Is there anything I can do to help out?
Are you doing this work in the open?
Can I find the code somewhere?

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 
email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
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