[Syllable-kernel] upcoming Syllable patches..

[Jake H. <jh...@an...>]

I am busy preparing my next "mega-patch" for the kernel which will:

* add support for SSE/SSE2 and lazy floating-point context switching,
* inline numerous short assembly language functions from intel.s,
* fix a few signal handling and fork/exec context initialization bugs,
* correct numerous typos and grammatical errors in the source code,
* improve the performance of allocating and freeing memory pages, and

* integrate the latest version of <atheos/isa_io.h> and "inc/io_ports.h" 
from Linux (the second one gives us more readable code since I was able 
to replace "0x20" with "PIC_MASTER_CMD", "0x43" with "PIT_MODE", and so 
on throughout the i8259A access code).

I'm also halfway done with integrating the latest TSC timer code from 
Linux which uses the Pentium internal clock to give sub-microsecond 
precision to the udelay() and get_system_time() calls.  It's necessary 
to have the best possible accuracy for gettimeofday() in order for 
LMbench to give accurate results in a short benchmarking run.  Right 
now, LMbench says it is only accurate to 1000000us, compared to 5000us 
precision under Linux, which is the best possible result (1000000us is 
the worst possible result).

Anyway, I will try to have those patches posted to syllable-kernel list 
tomorrow afternoon for y'all.  I finally got around to installing 
Syllable onto a native partition on my laptop and it is super fast!  I 
was able to make some small improvements to Syllable's performance under 
VMware, but it is still a very slow OS to emulate.  Compiling things 
takes at least 10x longer in VMware than natively so be forewarned if 
you are thinking of going that route for development.

Cheers,
Jake