NOTE: right now the trunk can only be used with an emulator like QEmu or Bochs. I explain why here.
So the AOT is now capable of encoding the CIL metadata into the kernel, but it increases the size of the kernel to larger than can fit on our floppy disk image, so we have to move away from using floppy images to test. The logical two choices are CD images and hard drive images. Since HDD images require far less code to be written on our part, we updated the disk image updater to support writing to hard disk images and now that is the default in the trunk. However, there is a side effect. VMware and Virtual PC both have separate proprietary formats for their hard drive images, which makes them unusable for SharpOS development with the new images. QEmu works great but on Windows due to a QEmu bug, you have to specify the BIOS files on the command line using -L. We want to avoid this so that Windows users will have a good and painless experience while working on SharpOS, so we are leaning toward bundling the Windows edition of QEMU into our trunk under References/ and making the nant scripts capable of launching it automatically. This will make things a LOT more easier for both operating systems, and since Linux doesn't need -L (because the BIOS files are always at the default location in the filesystem), we dont need to include the Linux binaries. We're ready to go ahead and start this but there are a lot more developers who are working on SharpOS then just the people who were in the channel when we discussed it, so do you have any comments or issues with us going with this plan? PS: this will also help us standardize the process for dumping serial output, meaning future changes to our text system which dump it all to serial will be much more useful for devs without any special digging for the option in your emulator. -- fury long name: William Lahti handle :: fury freenode :: xfury blog :: http://xfurious.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ SharpOS-Developers mailing list SharpOS-Developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sharpos-developers
