minimum practical hardware?

[Joshua Napoli]

Do you all have a sense of what the minimum practical hardware for an erlang runtime environment would be? 

[Kai Janson]

Raspberry Pi works fine;

256MB RAM
4GB SDCard
Ethernet
HDMI
USB keyboard and mouse during setup

--Kai

Sent from my iPhone

[Joshua Napoli]

Do you know what would limit the Erlang VM from being ported to smaller (microcontroller) systems? Where can I find information about porting to new architectures?

Best,

Josh

[Omer Kilic]

Hi Josh,

On 29/08/12 17:42, Joshua Napoli wrote:
> Do you know what would limit the Erlang VM from being ported to smaller
> (microcontroller) systems? Where can I find information about porting to
> new architectures?

There isn't a definitive guide to porting the Erlang VM to new
architectures (that I am aware of), the closest match is this document
here: http://www.erlang.org/faq/implementations.html

The VM itself relies on POSIX primitives and a TCP/IP library being
present (sockets are used heavily) so as long as you can provide these
with your new architecture, you should be fine.

There have been efforts to strip the VM down and run things on 'bare
metal' and it should be possible to do that, it just depends how much
time and willpower you have.

Regarding the previous question on this thread about the minimum
practical hardware, the same page states:

"""
8.10 Is Erlang small enough for embedded systems?

Rule of thumb: if the embedded system can run an operating system like
linux, then it is probably possible to get current implementations of
Erlang running on it with a reasonable amount of effort. Getting Erlang
to run on, say, an 8 bit CPU with 32kByte of RAM is not feasible. People
successfully run the Ericsson implementation of Erlang on systems with
as little as 16MByte of RAM. It is reasonably straightforward to fit
Erlang itself into 2MByte of persistant storage (e.g. a flash disk).
"""

We know that there are people running Erlang applications on top of
OpenWRT in re-purposed network hardware, so it is possible to run Erlang
on very small devices as long as they run Linux or a similar operating
system.


Regards,
Omer.


PS: If you haven't seen it already, we now have esl-erlang packages for
Raspberry Pi available here:
https://www.erlang-solutions.com/downloads/download-erlang-otp

> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Kai Janson <kot...@gmail.com
> <mailto:kot...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Raspberry Pi works fine;
>
> 256MB RAM
> 4GB SDCard
> Ethernet
> HDMI
> USB keyboard and mouse during setup
>
> --Kai
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Aug 21, 2012, at 10:14 AM, Joshua Napoli <jna...@gmail.com

> <mailto:jna...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> > Do you all have a sense of what the minimum practical hardware
> for an erlang runtime environment would be?
>
>

--
Omer Kilic
KTP Associate - Embedded Systems
Erlang Solutions Ltd.
www.erlang-solutions.com