[Syllable-developer] Syllable stubornly refusing to boot from CD, film at 11

[Kristian V. D. V. <va...@li...>]

Hi all,

Thought I'd update the news, as I know a lot of you are waiting for the 
bootable CDs.

The last two days have been spent arm-wrestling the kernel in an attempt to 
pursuad it that just because sys_mount() failed the first time, it shouldn't 
give up (CD's take time to spin up and the ATAPI driver isn't always quite 
accurate about whats in the drive...)  A couple of quick hacks later, and it 
works.

Then I spent this evening trying to debug a problem that doesn't exist! 
(/dev/disk/ide/hdc/raw and /dev/disk/ide/cdc/raw look the same in a Grub 
shell).  In my defence your honour, I have been forced to write "advanced" 
MS-DOS batch files on a Win2k machine all day and was temporarily insane.

Now I have managed to get Syllable booting from a CD, to a point.  There is a 
crash bug in the ISO filesystem which means that user-space applications do 
not run.  Basically, we can't read Symlinks on a RockRidge CD, which means 
that files like /system/libs/libc.so.1 "don't exist" when E.g. the init 
process tries to run.  Thats a big blocker!

So tommorow I'll be debugging the ISO9660 filesystem (If I have time, I am 
pre-booked for most of tommrow evening.)  If you have the time, please try 
debugging the ISO9660 RockRidge stuff, too :)

Stay tuned for the next installment of the long running saga[1] of "Making 
Syllable boot from a CD!"

[1]: 3 years is almost a never ending story, come to think of it...

-- 
Vanders
http://syllable.sourceforge.net/
http://www.liqwyd.com