Re: [Freedos-32-dev] tar ball for download.
Status: Pre-Alpha
Brought to you by:
salvois
From: luca a. <l_...@ho...> - 2001-04-23 14:59:38
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Hi Darran, I have been a little ``latitant'' (does this word exist in english?), but now I am back... (unfortunately, the Easter Holidays finished also here in italy :) In other words, sorry for the late response. Anyway, this is the situation: for what concerns the memory manager, we are still based on the quick'n'dirty Physical Memory Manager that I wrote some months ago just to compile the code... Surprisingly, it is not showing any notable bug (but, of course it is slow, inefficient, and so on...). I am using it for allocating RAM to the kernel and to the DPMI driver. The problem in allocating DPMI memory is that the DJGPP runtime (in particular, the brk function) expects that memory is allocated at increasing addresses: for example if the program resides between 0x20000 and 0x30000 and a DJGPP program allocates some memory through a DPMI service, it expects that the allocated memory is between 0x30000 and 0x30000 + size. The FD32 PMM, instead, allocates the first free memory chunk that it finds. Hence, the memory can be allocated (for example) from 0x10000 to 0x10000 + size, and the DJGPP gets crazy (setting the segment limit to 0x10000 + size, or doing other similar things). I solved this problem by implementing a dpmi_alloc function that uses the PMM to allocate memory in the way DJGPP likes... For what concerns the video driver, yes, you are right, we don't have any code for accessing the video. We just have some text-mode write, scroll and clear functions from OSLib, but we still need drivers for graphic modes or advanced text mode (I feel that the OSLib functions are quite slow, but I may be wrong). Hence, you are welcome to contribute a video driver. BTW, which kind of video standard are you planning to support? In my impression, standard VGA modes are quite old (and low-res), whereas VESA is not going to be supported anymore (if I correctly understand the market trend). Some years ago I wrote a small driver for S3 cards, but it only supports Trio64 and similar, that are now obsolete. Does some other hardware standard exist? (DirectX? OpenGL? ...?) Wops... I am sorry, I am asking too much questions... Finally, for what concerns the CVS tarball, I see that Salvo is going to do something about it. Otherwise, I can manage to create a ``dayly CVS snapshot'', and to put it on my server. Bye, Luca _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. |