4 ms·
> CP/M programs often behave in ways which would be damaging to modern hardware -- endless input-checking loops at full CPU speed, for example. To be honest, I
by ahepp 5y ago
> CP/M programs often behave in ways which would be damaging to modern hardware -- endless input-checking loops at full CPU speed, for example. To be honest, I do not know if this kind of thing would be damaging to a Pico, but I don't want to risk it. CPICOM has a number of pause points built in, to give the microcontroller time to idle. These do slow the system down even further, and I'm not sure whether they're necessary.
This shouldn't be necessary on an MCU. Any kind of sleep call is probably just spinning the CPU anyway. There's often support for deeper power saving states, but MCUs are generally designed to be run full speed all the time.
- jstanley 5y agoI don't think busy loops are damaging to the hardware. They just pointlessly waste CPU time.
- mistrial9 5y agoits my understanding that you cannot damage the physical CPU by software instructions, period. However, heat from multi-core operations is not the same. Hardware gets damaged by heat all the time. So "loops waiting for input" may never damage the hardware, but "causing more cores to operate at the same time" can cause heat damage on some setups..
- spc476 5y agoThere are CPUs out there that can be put into a "sleep" type mode. On the x86, there's the HLT instruction, which stops CPU execution until an interrupt happens. The 68k series has the STOP instruction, which does the same thing.
- watersb 5y agoHalt and Catch Fire: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)#Motorola_6800 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computi...
- isthisnametaken 5y agoCouple of things to note 1) The Pico doesn't have an OS, by default. It's designed to run bits of code people have written in the SDK. There are no guarantees that someone won't write code that endlessly busy-waits checking for a condition, and no warnings that doing so can be harmful 2) It costs about $4. Is there really much to lose if you "risk it" with this software?