From doug at bogon.ca  Mon Aug  8 12:04:47 2016
From: doug at bogon.ca (Douglas Paul)
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2016 15:04:47 -0400
Subject: Project Idea
In-Reply-To: <mwou6gw9m6dn7ve9diwv0t2k.1468389152132@email.android.com>
References: <mwou6gw9m6dn7ve9diwv0t2k.1468389152132@email.android.com>
Message-ID: <20160808190447.GP7654@bogon.ca>

Hello all,

I was surprised to see new messages here like the others when I happened to
hit '.' in Mutt (I don't do that often)

It's surely been years since anyone has heard from me but I thought I'd
reply to Ralph's question of a couple weeks ago : In fact I have one
Netwinder still running. You might be able to see a 'Corel Computer' MAC
address in an IPv6 address in the headers on this message, depending on how
things connect.

I had picked up a dual-RM model (both with 128MB RAM) on eBay for almost
nothing. IIRC they had previously served as nameservers for the Rebel.com
domains :)

The one I have still running I'm still using as a nameserver and a mail
server (routing only). It's running the final release of Debian for armv4l.
Which is really really old now ... amazing how fast time goes.

My old DM currently has a version of Gentoo I was trying to get going with a
patched gcc to support the 'neweabi' without the return instruction it
requires. It was actually working fine and had good performance, but I
lacked spare time to migrate the server to it.

We'll see how much longer it keeps going ... I'm slowly migrating services
off it as I find time. It's been remarkably stable though ... over a decade
now without any real failures. The hard drive was replaced with a CF card so
that probably helps ...

Doug


On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 07:52:32AM +0200, janrinze wrote:
> Hi Andrew and the rest,
> Yes we have been very busy with Netwinders in the past. The phone you are holding is probably ARM based and it has a linux kernel that has become possible also because of the work we have done on the Netwinders. That phone is more than ten times more powerful than a Netwinder but nonetheless it's very similar.?The StrongArm had to do without a FPU which is probably what set it back too far from the competition.?
> I would love to see a 8 core cortex A73 in a Netwinder setup. It will be very energy efficient and please with about 8 or 16 GB Ram.
> That's a dream machine which would allow both office and gaming next to dedicated embedded implementations.
> Did you know that I recently built a Acorn Atom from diy.acornatom.nl ? 6502 plus CPLD and FPGA.. Runs my 1980"s software like a charm. :-)
> Best regards,?Jan Rinze Peterzon.?
> 
> -------- Original message --------
> From: "Andrew E. Mileski" <andrewm at isoar.ca> 
> Date: 7/11/16  19:44  (GMT+01:00) 
> To: netwinder at netwinder.org 
> Subject: Re: Project Idea 
> 
> Looked at my e-mail on my mobile phone and saw Jan Rinze's name, not noticing it 
> was a NetWinder post, as I subscribe to several lists.? Thought, "oh wow, I wow, 
> I remember that one!"
> 
> I've gone over to the dark side:? I have a Raspberry PI 3 Model B running Fedora 
> 24, that is all and more of what the NetWinder wanted to be.? Guess the 
> NetWinder was a couple of decades ahead in concept, but behind in technology.
> 
> I really like the RPI 3B, but it requires turning a blind-eye to the large 
> amount of proprietary binary blobs it takes to get the the thing running.? The 
> RPI3 performance is really impressive once the frequency governor is changed to 
> "performance" to boot in cmdline.txt, and then once booted changed to "ondemand" 
> with a 60% threshold via tmpfiles.d (or whatever poison you prefer).
> 
> I divested myself of all NetWinders about two years ago when I last moved, 
> dumping them on Ralph (I think?), and he probably just dropped them at the 
> recyclers when he recently moved.
> 
> ~~
> Andrew E. Mileski
> 
> On 2016-07-10 04:52, janrinze wrote:
> > I still have a couple of Netwinders. There are a few projects in mind where they
> > are useful. Not having any time is the biggest hurdle for me and I hope to have
> > a little bit of time in the next few months.
> > Will keep you updated.
> >
> > Jan Rinze.


-- 
Douglas Paul




From andrewm at isoar.ca  Mon Aug  8 15:14:30 2016
From: andrewm at isoar.ca (Andrew E. Mileski)
Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:14:30 -0400
Subject: Project Idea
In-Reply-To: <20160808190447.GP7654@bogon.ca>
References: <mwou6gw9m6dn7ve9diwv0t2k.1468389152132@email.android.com>
 <20160808190447.GP7654@bogon.ca>
Message-ID: <57A90446.40401@isoar.ca>

For what it is worth, a project of mine that originated on the NetWinder has 
been recently added to GitHub:

math-sll:  A fixed point (31.32 bit) math library.

https://github.com/aemileski/math-sll

I'm close to releasing the next revision too, probably within a week.

I originally wrote it for use with a MP3 player on the NetWinder that was 
consuming something like 90% to 94% CPU using the FPU emulator, which dropped to 
about 9% to 11% using my fixed-point math.  Last I looked at any MP3 player 
source code, they all now used 16 bit fixed-point math, so my math library is no 
longer required for that purpose.  However, math-sll is still useful.

It has recently been packaged for the Pebble OS, though an earlier (bugged) 
revision has been a part of PebbleGL for a couple of years.  These are both 
third-party projects:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/pebble-math-sll

https://github.com/mhungerford/PebbleGL

I once spotted math-sll being used by something for MAME, the Multiple Arcade 
Machine Emulator, but I can't find a link to that at the moment.

~~
Andrew E. Mileski