GRiSP 2 – Erlang and Elixir on bare metal

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peerstritzinger/grisp-2

by lelf • 7 years ago

223 38 7 years ago

I'm not sure this counts as "bare metal" since it runs in a VM. Though doing it this way is probably cheaper then using an FPGA.

dnautics2• 7 years ago

I'm not 100% sure but I think it's not running on a VM in the virtualization sense; by VM they probably mean BEAM, which is a VM in the same sense that JVM or python are VMs.

wiml• 7 years ago

I was hoping they'd actually made a bare-metal BEAM implementation like the Lisp and Forth hardware that people have made in the past. This device looks like it's Erlang-on-BEAM-on-RTEMS, which is undoubtedly a more practical and useful thing, but less intriguing.

peerst2• 7 years ago

Yes we boot the BEAM on the hardware.

andrewflnr• 7 years ago

The distinction between an OS and a language VM is blurry. When the language VM has such robust support for concurrency and IPC, the distinction is, in terms of functionality if not name, pretty much obliterated.

BubRoss• 7 years ago

It makes me wonder if anyone has made VMs using the virtualization hardware in modern computers. Nested page tables seem exceptionally useful just as a jumping off point. Maybe the fact that they would still have to use the native instruction set is the limiting factor.

Ixiaus2• 7 years ago

This is neat, I would have loved to see this a few years ago when I was working on a touchpad dimmer that I used Erlang on (the hardware was originally designed to run Linux so it was easy to put Erlang on there but having a lower-cost solution by not requiring Linux would've been great).

Erlang's remote RPC, high-quality CRDT libraries, and hot-code loading made it an incredible technology for implementing IoT software product features.

marci• 7 years ago

Would something like this[1] worked for your project?

[1] https://medium.com/@Bettio/atomvm-how-to-run-elixir-code-on-...

Ixiaus2• 7 years ago

Possibly.

elcritch4• 7 years ago

This is great! I haven't tried the boards (yet) but it's difficult to find good industrial ready boards out there. Combine that with the difficulty of handling precise & consistent timing below 1 ms in Linux then these boards are a real gem!

bloaf• 7 years ago

I'm mildly interested in industrial-ready boards myself, but my industrial-ready means sitting outside in a hot and high-vibration environment doing signal processing. Everything I've heard about Erlang says it would be great at the networking part, but has no- or lousy- libraries for most number crunching applications.

elcritch4• 7 years ago

You can make even an RPi survive harsher conditions with proper housing. Though it’s easier to work with the RPi compute module for that.

What kind of signal processing? The computational libraries are somewhat rough. Though the Elixir communities are slowly adding more libraries, like Matrex (https://github.com/versilov/matrex). It’s surprisingly easy to write C and Rust extensions.

e_proxus4• 7 years ago

You can include other C libraries (and whatever else you can manage to interface towards via Erlang's C driver interface) using NIFs (native implemented functions) and Erlang port drivers. This means it's entirely possible to use Erlang for the networking and coordination part and special code for the signal processing.

nikofeyn2• 7 years ago

national instruments makes the SoM, single-board RIO, and myRIO products. each has an fpga that can be programmed with labview and/or xilinx tools and a cpu running real-time linux that can be programmed with labview or any other toolchain you want to install on the linux portion. comes ready to interact with hardware of course.

amelius3• 7 years ago

How easy is it to do real-time programming in Erlang? Would it be possible to get to 10 microsecond precision, to e.g. reliably drive a stepper motor directly from code?

jlouis2• 7 years ago

10us is not generally achievable. Expect the lowest granularity you can get to be in the millisecond range. Erlang provides soft real-time, and under load you might see a process come later to the scheduler. You are guaranteed that the delay is somewhat fair over all processes though.

If you want harder real-time, it is usually better to have a specialized kernel handling that, locked to a CPU core, and then have the Erlang system orchestrate work as a control backplane for that kernel.

amelius3• 7 years ago

Question about Erlang: is it possible to send large blobs of binary data (e.g. video frames) from one process to another with the guarantee that the data is not serialized and the transfer is close to instantaneous?

viraptor2• 7 years ago

If your binary is over some threshold (video frames almost certainly qualify) and the processes live on the same node, then the binaries should stay on binheap / refcounted memory and not get copied.

ergl• 7 years ago

Binary blobs over 64B are shared with other processes via reference counted pointers, instead of by copy. Of course this only applies to processes inside the same machine.

You can check the official docs: http://erlang.org/doc/efficiency_guide/binaryhandling.html

elcritch4• 7 years ago

Not sure if the overall performance but some people have done streaming mpeg on Nerves using the Picam [1].

1: https://github.com/electricshaman/picam/blob/master/README.m...

bobwaycott• 7 years ago

This is really cool. You can find out more about the project at https://grisp.org

tombert2• 7 years ago

I wonder if this will support Joxa or Lisp-Flavored-Erlang. Those are pretty much all I use on the Erlang VM nowadays, and I would love to get more into embedded stuff.

e_proxus4• 7 years ago

Because it is the full Erlang BEAM VM it can run any byte code compiled for it, including Joxa or LFE. However, we only have extra helper tooling for Erlang and Elixir at the moment. You can create a release manually and include any dependencies you want though.

tombert2• 7 years ago

Oh!! That's super cool, I think I will contribute then.

Assuming that I'm not a completely incompetent at programming (which admittedly might be a stretch :) ), would you be open to someone making a PR and adding Joxa or LFE tooling?

nikofeyn2• 7 years ago

how does this compare to nerves?

thenewwazoo• 7 years ago

Nerves is Linux with an Erlang init(1), built with buildroot, and using sysfs for peripheral I/O. This is BEAM on an RTOS, which makes it effectively bare-metal.

DoingIsLearning• 7 years ago

Well to be technical an RTOS is not effectively baremetal. But I agree that it is extremely 'close to the metal'.

ElijahLynn• 7 years ago

Love the bookshelf in the background of Peer Stritzinger's video feed. FreeBSD, UNIX, and a huge row of O'Reilly books on the bottom shelf! I think O'Reilly are some of the best, most thoroughly reviewed technical books out there, I always choose O'Reilly if the topic exists as they seem to vet their authors quite well and make sure they have competent subject matter experts actually write and review the books!

#phsycialbooks #FTW

GRiSP 2 – Erlang and Elixir on bare metal

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