Expanding the XMOS into a standalone general-purpose system

[dpeschel]

You could call this a design proposal, which is why it's in this topic.

The XMOS operating system index of ideas doesn't mention the idea of an XMOS system creating q new boot image and then immediately loading it. This would open up all kinds of interesting scenarios. The one I'm thinking of, particularly, is creating a small computer system (about as powerful as the 8-bit machines of the '80s, but multicore) out of an XMOS board, It would be fun to see how the multicore design would change things.

The main problem is how to save the information about the new boot image so that the boot loader can get it. The simplest solution I can think of is to add extra hardware on the board, allowing you to set the configuration on the next board reset. Say two separate SD card slots and a "using this slot" flip-flop and a "use that slot next time" flip-flop. More elegantly, a single SD card slot and a small RAM space for storing a filename and perhaps some boot code.

A second problem is how to get away from the idea of boot code and board hardware, and move toward the idea of data and software. That is data _about_ a boot image like which resources it uses. This seems like the best way to solve the problem because it is necessary if you want to separate loading/unloading from booting.

My question to the experts is, am I thinking about this the right way? Did the Transputer systems try to solve the same problem, for example? The only other example I know of is the CDC 6600 supercomputer system and its successors. The CDC had shared memory and shared disks, unlike the current XMOS boards.

Thanks,

-- Derek