5 ms·

Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI

124 points by rickcarlino 1y ago

kragen 1y 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.
- crc_ 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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)
      - kragen 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
      - pm215 1y 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 1y 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.
  - deivid 1y ago
    you probably should set the serial port speed
    - kragen 1y ago
      Oh, I didn't realize -nographic was using a serial port. That's probably why it's slow!
      - ddingus 1y ago
        It may default to 9600... tons of devices will fall back to that, given no other instruction
        kragen 1y ago
        Yeah, that was my inference. It looked like about 9600.
  - maxdamantus 1y ago
    > 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. You'd probably want to use `-enable-kvm` so it's not doing full software emulation. Assuming you're running this on another x86-64 machine.
    - crc_ 1y ago
      Thanks; I'll start doing that when running on Linux. (I had missed this, as my main dev box is running OpenBSD which doesn't have kvm)
      - kragen 1y ago
        I'm surprised to see that tcg (TCG, the tiny code generator, the original QEMU) is still the default accel, even when KVM could be used instead.
- coolcoder613 1y 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 1y 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_ 1y ago
    With this, I wasn't seeing any output with -display curses. It does work with -nographic or using a vnc connection to qemu's display, as well as on the two physical machines I currently have access to.
    - coolcoder613 1y ago
      That would probably be because it is using UEFI text mode rather than VGA text mode.
      - kragen 1y ago
        Oh, I didn't know UEFI text mode didn't use VGA text mode! That could be an important consideration. But I suppose you can still frob the VGA registers to set VGA text mode, right? Even if you boot under UEFI?
        coolcoder613 1y ago
        While that way work on some hardware, on a lot of hardware it won't. see https://old.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments/yjm04z/vga_on_uefi/iuolh67/ https://old.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments/yjm04z/vga_on_uefi/i...
codezero 1y ago
Immediately reminded of the PowerPC bootloader on Macs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026
oersted 1y 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.
- kragen 1y 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_ 1y 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 1y ago
      Sorry! I appreciate the correction. I forgot that it was word-oriented.
- 1y ago
gjvc 1y ago
the name "ILO" clashes with "Integrated Lights-Out" management as used by (or was used by) some server hardware vendors.
- imglorp 1y ago
  IPMI - standard DRAC - Dell iLOM - Sun/Oracle iLO - HP IMM - IBM
  - buildbot 1y ago
    XSCF - Fujitsu/Oracle SPARC (I wonder how they got that acronym)
    - kragen 1y ago
      It looks like they generated random four-letter combinations until they found one that wasn't used.
    - imglorp 1y ago
      Possibly eXtended System Control Facility.
    - buildbot 1y ago
      Ooo also, there is the RMC in some HP Alphaservers
    - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
      eXtended System Configuration Facility?
  - p_l 1y 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
- crc_ 1y ago
throw0101c 1y ago
Ah, Forth-as-BIOS. Memories of Sun SPARC (and Apple PowerPC): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware * https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Open_Firmware https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Open_Firmware
- davidw 1y ago
  No reference in those articles to the open firmware song? Pity... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Wyvb9GotM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Wyvb9GotM
  - DonHopkins 1y 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 1y 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 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 https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://web.archive.org/web/20121119070656/https://elinux.org/Flameman/openfirmware-apple https://web.archive.org/web/20121119070656/https://elinux.or... http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0 http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0 https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689282 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810 https://web.archive.org/web/20090920123423/http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi 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.

124 points by rickcarlino 1y 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.

crc_ 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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)
    - kragen 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
    - pm215 1y 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 1y 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.
- deivid 1y ago
  you probably should set the serial port speed
  - kragen 1y ago
    Oh, I didn't realize -nographic was using a serial port. That's probably why it's slow!
    - ddingus 1y ago
      It may default to 9600... tons of devices will fall back to that, given no other instruction
      - kragen 1y ago
        Yeah, that was my inference. It looked like about 9600.
- maxdamantus 1y ago
  > 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. You'd probably want to use `-enable-kvm` so it's not doing full software emulation. Assuming you're running this on another x86-64 machine.
  - crc_ 1y ago
    Thanks; I'll start doing that when running on Linux. (I had missed this, as my main dev box is running OpenBSD which doesn't have kvm)
    - kragen 1y ago
      I'm surprised to see that tcg (TCG, the tiny code generator, the original QEMU) is still the default accel, even when KVM could be used instead.
coolcoder613 1y 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 1y 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_ 1y ago
  With this, I wasn't seeing any output with -display curses. It does work with -nographic or using a vnc connection to qemu's display, as well as on the two physical machines I currently have access to.
  - coolcoder613 1y ago
    That would probably be because it is using UEFI text mode rather than VGA text mode.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Oh, I didn't know UEFI text mode didn't use VGA text mode! That could be an important consideration. But I suppose you can still frob the VGA registers to set VGA text mode, right? Even if you boot under UEFI?
      - coolcoder613 1y ago
        While that way work on some hardware, on a lot of hardware it won't. see https://old.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments/yjm04z/vga_on_uefi/iuolh67/ https://old.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments/yjm04z/vga_on_uefi/i...

codezero 1y ago

Immediately reminded of the PowerPC bootloader on Macs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026

oersted 1y 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.

kragen 1y 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_ 1y 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 1y ago
    Sorry! I appreciate the correction. I forgot that it was word-oriented.
1y ago

gjvc 1y ago

the name "ILO" clashes with "Integrated Lights-Out" management as used by (or was used by) some server hardware vendors.

imglorp 1y ago
IPMI - standard DRAC - Dell iLOM - Sun/Oracle iLO - HP IMM - IBM
- buildbot 1y ago
  XSCF - Fujitsu/Oracle SPARC (I wonder how they got that acronym)
  - kragen 1y ago
    It looks like they generated random four-letter combinations until they found one that wasn't used.
  - imglorp 1y ago
    Possibly eXtended System Control Facility.
  - buildbot 1y ago
    Ooo also, there is the RMC in some HP Alphaservers
  - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
    eXtended System Configuration Facility?
- p_l 1y 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
crc_ 1y ago

throw0101c 1y ago

Ah, Forth-as-BIOS. Memories of Sun SPARC (and Apple PowerPC): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware * https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Open_Firmware https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Open_Firmware

davidw 1y ago
No reference in those articles to the open firmware song? Pity... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Wyvb9GotM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Wyvb9GotM
- DonHopkins 1y 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 1y 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 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 https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://web.archive.org/web/20121119070656/https://elinux.org/Flameman/openfirmware-apple https://web.archive.org/web/20121119070656/https://elinux.or... http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0 http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0 https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689282 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810 https://web.archive.org/web/20090920123423/http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi 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.