Pycorn

Pycorn is an interpreted operating system written in Python, intended to recreate the style of learning available on 16-bit microcomputers. Device drivers, file systems, network protocols can all be implemented in Python with no C or assembler code.

The goal of the project is to create a usable interpreter-centric OS environment with the capabilities of modern computers; allowing a smooth learning curve from the acquisition of basic programming skills right up to implementing new OS-level functionality and drivers. Performance is not a goal, though it would be nice :) Current development is targeted at a variety of ARM platforms due to the relative simplicity of the hardware.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

How it all fits together

Pycorn uses a cross-compiling gcc and the newlib embedded C library. This provides enough 'stuff' to compile the main python interpreter into a library.

To actually make a bootable image a linker script and entry point are required which are implemented by pycorn. These are architecture specific and include a few machine specific details: a small linker script with some platform physical addresses includes the main architecture linker script. The entry point uses a small amount of assembly then switches to position-independent C code for the majority of platform setup, then calls a generic C library setup function written in C.

Right now we only have them for Marvell's PXA270 system-on-chip, as used in the Gumstix Verdex development board http://www.gumstix.com. This board can be simulated by QEMU. A main() function is also required which invokes the python interpreter with some arguments, and though this is written in C it is portable.

Of course, it won't actually do anything visible; newlib has no actual IO facilities. A platform-specific serial debug driver is used for now, hooked up to newlib's stdin/stdout/stderr.

And.. that's it for now. There is no way to import any modules which aren't built into the interpreter as all file access fails right now, and Python's builtin readline is really stupid so you can't even backspace.. but it works!

Binary releases

Pycorn is not very useful as a binary image at this point, because the builtin Python code is not yet finished, and so it is expected that people will want to play around with the Python code and build a new image from it.

However, the actual native binary contains only the minimum amount of code to start up the interpreter and begin to import stuff, and binary releases contain a prebuilt copy of this binary. This means you don't need a compiler.

Requirements

Pycorn requires several things in order to build, even if you are using a binary release:

1. makepp 2.0. makepp is a nice make replacement with lots of nifty features; used primarily because I hate make's handling of subdirectories. See http://makepp.sourceforge.net/ for their project page. deb and rpm packages are available there. There used to be a makepp snapshot in the pycorn tree but this has been removed now the 2.0 release is out.

2. If you aren't using a binary release, you need to build the arm-eabi crosscompiler toolchain. It needs to be built specifically for Pycorn; a binary package won't work. To build it, you will need the normal host toolchain for your system (on debian-alikes, install build-essential), the header files for libgmp, libmpfr and libmpc (the dev packages for them from your distro), and texinfo. Then, run:

   cd toolchain; makepp TOOLSPREFIX=/dir/to/install/to
   

   Once it's built, add the bin directory inside TOOLSPREFIX to your path.

3. If you aren't using a binary release, install autoconf. Python's configure script needs regeneration after patching for cross-compilability.

Building

If you are using a binary release, skip step 1.

1. Run makepp seeds/hello/hello.uimage. This is a "hello world" program which should load into u-boot and print on the default platform serial port.

   If you have an actual Gumstix Verdex board you should be able to load this by serial, tftp, or MMC, and execute it with bootm.

   If you don't, you can simulate it under QEMU by running makepp seeds/hello/run, assuming you have QEMU installed. The bootloader will be configured automatically so it should just run. Hit C-a x (C-a a x under screen) to kill QEMU.

2. Run makepp seeds/pycorn/pycorn.uimage. This is the python interpreter, with the minimum amount of code to boot pycorn built into it.

   Again, if you have an actual Verdex board it should run from u-boot.

   Otherwise, makepp seeds/pycorn/run to launch it in QEMU.