Ultibo – Bare-Metal Pascal for Raspberry Pi

by Fr0styMatt88 • 4 years ago

124 40 4 years ago

pulse7• 4 years ago

TLDR: Ultibo is a bare-metal environment written completely in Free Pascal. Because it supports multi-threading you can see it as Unikernel Operating System. You develop your bare-metal program in Lazarus IDE in Free Pascal and use Ultibo as (unikernel) library for your application. After compilation you get the Raspberry Pi image file which you put on your SD-card and run the program on RPI - baremetal. It has support for USB, Ethernet, FAT, NTFS, ...

Sunspark• 4 years ago

I knew holding on to my Pascal textbook since the 80s would come in handy one day. :)

In all seriousness though, I would like to understand this a bit better as I have not heard of this project before. Is Ultibo actually written in assembler, and then when you compile your Pascal program the assembler boot modules along with the compiled program code are merged together? To me, bare-metal means assembler, or if you're really hardcore, binary.

djur3• 4 years ago

It doesn't necessarily mean assembly, just the absence of a separate operating system. It looks like Ultibo is mostly written in Pascal, with a small amount of inline assembly to initialize the hardware, etc.

https://github.com/ultibohub/Core/blob/master/source/rtl/ult...

Smoosh• 4 years ago

Programming in PASCAL by Grogono ? I still have mine.

nine_k3• 4 years ago

Pascal is totally fine for bare metal programming. (Modula-2 would be better, but anyway.)

Early versions of macOS [1] were written in Pascal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pascal_(programming_l...

indigodaddy• 4 years ago

Wow this seems super fun and awesome for adults and kids alike

dragontamer6• 4 years ago

So Bare-metal is excellent for smaller boards, like ESP32, Teensy 4.1, or the tiny microcontrollers like AVR DD / ATMega, PIC, and STM32F4 or STM32G0. So are lightweight OSes like FreeRTOS. There's also Arduino (set of libraries), which is somewhere between a proper OS and bare metal.

Rasp. Pi however is extremely powerful, far more powerful than any computer we had in the 90s or early 00s. The idea of running RP4 "bare metal" is rather weird to me. RP4 has so much processor power on it that a proper OS seems like a no-brainer.

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Looking at Ultibo, it seems like it has a threading library (https://ultibo.org/wiki/Unit_Threads), so that makes it an OS in my eyes (at least as much of an OS as FreeRTOS).

Hmm, I think from a marketing perspective, they should discuss how Ultibo builds compare against minimal-Linux builds? It'd be great to compare Ultibo-Hello World vs Alpine Linux-Hello World (Alpine being the smallest Linux I'm aware of). Maybe have a comparison vs Ubuntu for good measure as well.

wila• 4 years ago

The FAQ says it runs on pretty much all RPI's. So you can also use it on an old Raspberry Pi you might have laying around. It doesn't have to be a RPi 4.

dragontamer6• 4 years ago

RP2 is quad-core, 900MHz and 1000000kB of RAM, a behemoth compared to the single-core 20 MHz and 2kB of RAM chips (ATMega328p aka Arduino Uno, which actually runs at 16MHz) I was comparing it to in the embedded world.

My point stands: Raspberry Pi is huge. Even old models like RP2 give you 6-orders-of-magnitude more RAM and 2-orders-of-magnitude more Compute power. Its just not the kind of processor I think of that needs to be run "bare-metal", or even "something more efficient than Linux needs to be installed on here".

Its interesting that Ultibo is aiming for the Rasp. Pi. I'm curious what kinds of use cases people will find for it.

monocasa3• 4 years ago

The RPi is derided for it's ability to keep up with even soft real time tasks because of the matching "huge"ness of the software stack people commonly associate with it (full Linux). I welcome alternate stabs at software stacks that aim for a KISS attitude to let it compete with an Arduino when it comes to signal twiddling, etc.

dragontamer6• 4 years ago

I personally recall the GPIO benchmarks you're talking about, and I seem to remember it being related to the CPU itself and nothing to do with Linux.

Its not very hard to go into "Realtime" priority and force your processes to use up 100% of the CPU's power in Linux. If you need the _WHOLE_ CPU, then you can forcibly grab it as long as you're root.

chinabot• 4 years ago

Funny story, I found a game I wrote in Turbo Pascal from 1988 so I decided to run it a couple of years ago in a DOSBox. whenever I ran it, it just ended immediately so I assumed it was broke, I eventually tried it in a VM running DOS at about a hundredth the normal CPU speed speed and I saw the system draw the screen, play the demo game, time out and end all in about five seconds.

Fr0styMatt883• 4 years ago

Example use in a DIY digital dashboard for a car:

https://youtu.be/iH9lp-Nms-o

_alex_• 4 years ago

thats really cool

virgulino• 4 years ago

Awesome! Next steps: ChatGPT in a voice interface, and a Turbo Boost button.

Fr0styMatt883• 4 years ago

Or combine it with that engine noise generator that uses a full physical simulation:

https://youtu.be/RKT-sKtR970

That would be pretty sweet! I’m guessing with the ECU sensors you could feed in the data to a simulation of a different engine to get really authentic different engine noises.

netfortius• 4 years ago

FYI:

Main link [1] -> Object Pascal Tutorial [2] -> "There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs, but you do not have permission to create this page."

[1] https://ultibo.org/make/ [2] https://wiki.freepascal.org/Object_Pascal_Tutorial

nine_k3• 4 years ago

This is a blunder, of course.

But the serious docs are there: https://www.freepascal.org/docs.html (And I haven't forgotten Pascal since 1980s anyway...)

rollcat• 4 years ago

If you could only buy a Raspberry Pi these days... rpilocator.com exists, but RPi4's and/or Model B's barely (if ever) show up.

kristianp• 4 years ago

Any pico support planned?

Ultibo – Bare-Metal Pascal for Raspberry Pi

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