This is a branch of the libforth interpreter designed to be run as a Linux Kernel Module. It implements a character device that accepts Forth commands, from which input can be read back from it.

The project is a work in progress and likely to be very buggy, potentially making your system unstable.

The kernel module currently:

• loads
• makes a device called forth under /dev/
• initializes the Forth interpreter
• accepts input
• is very buggy

The idea of this module is that it could be used as a debugger of sorts for the kernel, if a better one is not available, and would become more integrated will become more featureful over time (as I learn more about kernel development). It is more of a toy than anything at the moment, so should not be used for anything serious.

Eventually block devices that roughly correspond to Forth blocks could be added, for the moment the module implements a single, simple, character device that can read in, and execute, commands.

The documentation is non-existent at the moment, and will not be rewritten until the features and implementation have become somewhat stable. As such, the only documentation is the source, forth.c.

However, here is some minimal information to get you start:

This module was built against kernel version 3.16, on Debian 8, x86-64. There is nothing hardware specific or special about the module, it should be quite portable.

To build:

make

This should build a test program, called test, and a kernel module, forth.ko.

To load the module, as root:

insmod forth.ko

You can view the output of dmesg, the module is quite verbose and will tell you if it succeeded. If it did, /dev/forth should have now appeared on your system.

To run the test program, test.c, again as root:

./test

This should sent a simple test program to the device, the program then reads back the output, then exits.

The module will also create files under:

/sys/class/forth

The devices under here will be subject to a lot of change, so will not be documented for now.

Much like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem this device should be accessible by no one but the root user. The udev rules in the project, in the file 99-forth.rules set the device up to be only readable and writable by root.

The license for this branch has changed from an MIT license to a GPL one as used by the rest of the kernel.