I've identifed other debugging tools that we can use to get ELKS going, fast.
One issue is elksemu. It's a great tool to run bcc-created ELKS binaries
on linux. My first plan for getting bcc cross-compiling is to get it
running well on linux, thru elksemu.
But - elksemu handles the chmem field differently than ELKS,
and always allocates a 64k data segment. So programs have more memory
than on ELKS. I propose to change elksemu to exactly emulate ELKS.
Of course the ld86 -H option can be used to increase data space. With
ELKS brk() now working, we should make some progress here. Comments?
Also, does anybody have a chmem program? Or do I have to modify
the makefile with the -H option every time.
Also, ld86 by default always allocates a 32k heap (hex 8000) by default.
This is large. Any suggestions on making it smaller? We need a tool
that calculates the heap size used in a program. Then we know the size
that we should give -H. I can write this and the chkstk() stuff discussed earlier,
and we'll know both stack and heap sizes used by programs. This is all
required for stability, something ELKS needs.
Comments?
Greg
