[fmeyer]

The idea of an education computer is bugging my mind in the last 5 years.

If you consider modern hardware and OS is practically impossible to have a simple enough machine that you could teach the young generation. Fantasy consoles like pico-8 are good options for programming, but not for understanding the hardware underneath. That way you still have school who use old architectures for teaching.

[bpye]

A minimal RISC-V implementation is quite simple. There is a RISC-V implementation of xv6 - though that’ll require slightly more than the absolute minimum RISC-V implementation, specifically you’ll need CSRs, M, S and U mode and paging.

If you don’t care about paged memory you could do with just M and U mode. I have a small rtos that targets some of the WCH microcontrollers with that configuration. It does use the PMP but even that isn’t really necessary.

[kragen]

this sort of exists at https://github.com/cksystemsteaching/selfie (http://selfie.cs.uni-salzburg.at/)

> Selfie is a self-contained 64-bit, 12KLOC C implementation of: (...) a tiny (...) subset of C called C Star (C*) (...) to a tiny (...) subset of RISC-V called RISC-U[;] a[n] (...) emulator (...) that executes RISC-U code[;] (...) a (...) hypervisor (...) that provides RISC-U virtual machines

so they have a self-hosted instruction set architecture, compiler, and operating system, though the operating system is much simpler than xv6. because the instruction set is a subset of risc-v you can run its code on actual risc-v hardware (or qemu-system-riscv), but presumably you could also design risc-u hardware in verilog that was simpler than a full implementation of rv64i with whatever extensions the hypervisor needs

[ysofunny]

why would anybody NOT care about paged memory?

or maybe a better question is, why care about it? as far as I've understood, paged memory is a legacy from a time where cheap and fast memory wasn't a thing

how feasible is it to get rid of memory pages? I guess the hardest thing would be untangling interprocess memory safety from pages??

[Veserv]

The answer is memory fragmentation. Process memory safety can theoretically be done with a different scheme such as hardware memory capabilities. You could probably even do demand paging if the memory capability is not a true pointer, but some sort of memory system coherent handle. But, as soon as a process wants to allocate a 1 GB chunk and you have 2 GB, but only in 64 KB chunks you have a problem. You could go around copying data to compact the physical memory, but now you have serious interference problems.

You then run into the next problem of using say 32 MB in a "hot loop" in the middle of a 64 GB demand-loaded data structure on a 32 GB machine. You can not greedily load in the entire data structure from disk, so you need some sort of subset feature on your memory handles. But then what do you do about using two disjoint sections separated by over 32 GB? You need some way of having multiple subsets that correspond to physical addresses that do not respect the handle offset. Subset 1 corresponds to physical address range A and subset B corresponds to a uncorrelated physical address range B. Congratulations, you have reinvented memory mapping with extra steps.

[eterps]

Project Oberon does not use paged memory. For the most part memory defragmentation is done by a relatively simple system-wide garbage collector (by copying live objects to one end of the heap).

[kragen]

adding an mmu to a basic rv32e processor might double its size and power consumption, and more than double the verification effort; moreover, if you're targeting applications where deterministic execution time or even worst-case execution time (wcet) is a concern, the mmu is a very likely source of nondeterminism

so it's not so much that you don't care about it as that you might not be able to afford it. 'cheap and fast' depends on what scale of machine you're talking about; a 1¢ computer (not yet available) can afford less than a 10¢ computer like the pms150c or (rv32e) ch32v003, which can afford less than a 1-dollar computer like the stm32f104c8t6 or (rv32i) gd32vf104, which can afford less than a 10-dollar computer like a raspberry pi, which can afford less than a 100-dollar computer like a cellphone, which can afford less than a 1000-dollar computer like a gaming rig, which can afford less than a 10-kilobuck computer like a largish cpu server, which can afford less than a 100-kilobuck computer like a petabox

unix originally ran on the pdp-11, the relevant models of which had interprocess memory safety in the form of segmentation, but no paging. i've never used a pdp-11. adding paging (for example, on the vax the sun-1, and the i386) enabled a variety of new unix features:

- as you point out, it enables a process to be larger than physical memory;

- fork() became immensely faster because it didn't have to copy all of process memory, just the page table, and mark the existing pages copy-on-write;

- execve() became immensely faster for a similar reason: it could 'demand-page' the program into memory as you executed parts of it, instead of waiting to start executing it until the whole thing had been loaded from disk;

- shared libraries became possible, so that executable code used by many programs at once could exist as only a single copy in memory (though you could do this without paging if all the processes share the same address space, perhaps with different permissions imposed by an mpu — this wasn't considered an option for unix in part because it would involve either giving up fork() or only having one process in memory at a time);

- similarly, it became possible for processes to communicate through shared memory buffers, which is commonly used to get images onto the screen quickly;

- it became possible to memory-map files, like on multics, so you can access data in them without copying it, which normally takes about twice as long as accessing it;

- it became possible for user programs to use the paging hardware to implement the write barriers for their garbage collectors by using mprotect(), though that's never been a very popular thing to do because sigsegv handlers are slow and usually nonportable;

- and, as veserv pointed out, it eased fragmentation.

non-unix systems used paging for a variety of even more creative purposes:

- efficient system image checkpointing as in keykos or eumel, by way of atomically marking all pages on the system copy-on-write and then streaming out the dirty ones to disk, so you never had to reboot; after a power failure or system crash, all the same programs would be running in the same state as at the last checkpoint. qemu can do this too, i think

- distributed single-address-space oses, where memory pages migrate around a cluster over a network according to where they're being accessed, so every program on the cluster is running in a single shared 64-bit address space; this didn't turn out to be as useful as it sounds

- insert your mindblowing creative idea here

anyway it's totally possible to implement memory protection without paging, and lots of computers have, past (with segmentation) and present (with mpus). but paging gives you a lot more than just memory protection

[TillE]

Vintage 8-bit hardware is extremely comprehensible, and it teaches you fundamentals which absolutely still apply today. Ben Eater's YouTube videos are fantastic for this, both his 6502 project and his homebrew "from scratch" breadboard computer.

[ysofunny]

I think that somehow a computer than can learn to talk to other computers would be the pinacle solution

this is within reach now with LLMs, the remaining challenges would be somehow connecting the computers (a hardware compatibility issue) but the software should be able to figure the other software out somehow