Re: [Syllable-kernel] High-priority bugs, plus adding a HAL portability layer

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

On Friday 29 April 2005 00:59, Jake Hamby wrote:
> First, the "showstopper" bugs that we need to fix before 0.5.7:
>
> 2) Any other reproducible AFS bugs are high priority.  Fixing our SMP
> issues is high priority.

Both of these are very high priority.  I'd say the SMP issues are higher than 
AFS, but only by a fraction.

> 3) Glibc issues such as DNS resolving, proper timezone handling, and
> proper locale handling should be fixed for 0.5.7. 

I'm all over it, or at least I'll get DNS fixed in the next few days and then 
I can take a look at the tz and locale stuff.

> Currently GNU gettext 
> will crash when building Japanese message catalogs for GNU applications
> (e.g. binutils) due to a library loading bug in the new glibc.

Any stack traces or straces for me?

> I've been thinking about how to separate the x86-specific code from the
> kernel, which would make the code easier to understand as well as to
> port, without compromising the simplicity of the existing code.  The
> model I came up with is based loosely on the Windows NT concept of a
> HAL:  a thin layer beneath the kernel to do things like SMP
> initialization and bus enumeration for a particular platform.  My rough
> sketch looks like this:

<snip>

Sounds like a good plan to me, but you also need to consider possible endian 
issues and memory mapping.  Almost everything assumes IA32 with a 1:1 
virtual->physical mapping in the kernel, which is so unusual it will never be 
true anywhere else.  We need to start worrying about proper virt_to_phys(), 
virt_to_bus(), cpu_to_le() etc. macros and where to insert these into the 
code.  Eek!

-- 
Vanders
http://www.syllable.org
http://www.liqwyd.com