jcm's blog

[ from the giant-pandas-are-everywhere dept. ]

Well the project code is a good few thousand lines now and can talk to the prom, framebuffer, etc. though the memory management code is starting to get really bothering – at the moment everything I try to do seems to be failing, and it is very difficult to determine where when you have no hardware debugger. I am writing a minimal pixel painting assembly routing for emergency display blanking to determine whether the code is still running at certain points or if it has gone for a nice little trip through the memory to execute whatever it finds there again…

The memory concept at the moment is to have a single global free list which is initialised to contain a double(y) linked list of structs describing pages of memory – effectively all memory is one giant array of page frames with mimimal cleaverness implemented at this stage.

Jon.

[ from the got2-find-the-answer dept. ]

The problem that was happening with figuring out how to generate a got2 section for relocating data between kernel link address relocation has been resolved by using the gcc CFLAGS entry“-mrelocatable-lib”. Perhaps there is some documentation somewhere though it remains quite elusive.

Jon.

[ from the not-more-junk-jcm? dept. ]

I picked up another IPX and SPARCstation 20 this afternoon, bringing my total Sun count to 5 now. I saw a rather nice HP 9000 which is frankly too large even for me to think I am going to fit in my house or parents house. There was an SGI Indy which I think I may pick up soon for a reasonable price. [UPDATED: 17:40:15 by jcm] It was an Indigo and not an Indy.

Jon.

[ from the laugh-it-is-funny dept. ]

Hi, I found this excellent “memo” from an “Applicant” who was turned down for a job and subsequently offered feedback.

Jon.

[ from the crunch-time dept. ]

Ok, so I started writing real actual code. Amazing. Anyway, I discovered that Open Firmware is more than a little fiddly to deal with. I understand most of the code I have encountered though I’m not sure why it is necessary to relocate the GOT (Global Offset Table) before init and move it back after. Little things like this I will hopefully figure out later on today.

Jon.

[ from the softly-softly dept. ]

Good news! The government is to squander 330 million pounds on “domestic counter-terrorism measures”. See the BBC breakdown.

Jon.

[ from the CTCP-jcm-PING_JCM dept. ]

pong.

Jon.