Ada and beagleboard

Ada and beagleboard

[Olivier Scalbert]

Hello,

Do you think it is possible to experiment a little of Ada on the 
beagleboard ?
http://beagleboard.org/

Thanks,

Olivier

Re: Ada and beagleboard

[Ludovic Brenta]

On Apr 30, 8:33 am, Olivier Scalbert <olivier.scalb...@algosyn.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Do you think it is possible to experiment a little of Ada on the
> beagleboard ?http://beagleboard.org/

Yes, I think it is possible. There are two options, both requiring a
significant amount of work:

1) cross-compilation

You'd build a cross-compiler targetting arm-linux. If your host is
Debian, I'd be interested in your patches so that future Debian
releases support such a cross-compiler out of the box[1].

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-gcc/2009/02/msg00053.html and
replies

2) native compilation

It should be possible to install Debian's arm port on the board.
Unfortunately gnat-4.3 is not currently supported on arm, so you'd
have to build it using the cross-compiler. I'd be happy to integrate
your patches so that future Debian releases include gnat on arm. The
128 MiB of RAM might prove insufficient to run gnat comfortably,
especially if the board doesn't support paging.

--
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada and beagleboard

[Mike Silva]

On Apr 30, 4:00 am, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
> The 128 MiB of RAM might prove insufficient to run gnat comfortably,
> especially if the board doesn't support paging.

What would be a comfortable amount of RAM in your estimation?

Mike

Re: Ada and beagleboard

[Ludovic Brenta]

On Apr 30, 3:32 pm, Mike Silva <snarflem...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Apr 30, 4:00 am, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
>
> > The 128 MiB of RAM might prove insufficient to run gnat comfortably,
> > especially if the board doesn't support paging.
>
> What would be a comfortable amount of RAM in your estimation?

If you want to build gnat, at least 1 GiB is necessary(*). This
requirement would apply, for example, to a Debian "build daemon" which
recompiles all packages in Debian natively (including, therefore, GNAT
and other large packages).

If you only want to compile your own small programs with gnat, 512 MiB
should be sufficient; less if you can use paging to disk; but, again,
I don't know whether the BeagleBoard supports paging or not.

(*) I used to use an IBM ThinkPad T22 with a Pentium III@900 MHz and
256 Mib RAM. Building gnat 3.15p on it was OK; building GCC 4.1 with
only C and Ada enabled took 7 hours and heavy swapping. GCC 4.3 is
even larger. I replaced my T22 with a dual-core laptop with 2 GiB RAM
which I upgraded to 3 GiB for the purposes of recompiling GNAT.

--
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada and beagleboard

[Ludovic Brenta]

I just came across an alternative to the BeagleBoard that just might
have enough resouces to build gnat: the "plug computer", see
http://plugcomputer.org/
It has 512 MiB RAM, 512 MiB Flash and a 1.2 GHz ARM processor.

--
Ludovic Brenta.