I guess Jon accidentally sent this to me instead of the list.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jonathan Dickinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Jan 25, 2008 1:39 AM Subject: Re: [SharpOS Developers] Of metadata, hard drive images, and including QEMU in the trunk To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] So now you accuse us of copying you? Rather than destructively criticizing you I can offer you a few suggestions. Writing output to the serial: You might consider writing a small app to gather useful information from that file (we can see heap usage and such). We also have a test command that runs a few tests (still need to write a lot more), that outputs to the serial file and we get the test cases in our log app. You should think about using XML in the log file -> makes things a bit easier. We had a bug where '\0' was being put in the serial log from time to time: you can wrap the FileStream class to pull those out so that the XML parser remains happy (not sure if it was our code or QEMU, or if it has been fixed). HDD access: go for ATA, but word-on-the-wire is that you have a DMA controller. So you may not need to circumvent DMA, but it is easier to use ATA. QEMU, if the Windows users install it in C:\Program Files\Qemu it should work fine. QEMU+GDB has break-on-symbol functionality. We currently plug the System.Diagnostics.Debug.Break() method to use that symbol (__CODE_REQUESTED_BREAK if I remember correctly). Worth investigating. On 25/01/2008, William Lahti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > 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 > -- Jonathan -- 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
