What's going on here?

If you have been following the code lately you will have seen several things changing, quite dramatically.

One of which is that there is a new contributor, named Steven van der Schoot. His name already was in the  CREDITS file, but his role actually has changed dramatically.

Previously, all he was known for was the printhex function, which couldn't do much more that print out numbers in hex. I thought that was a bit messy, as I also wanted something that could do binary, decimal and octal, and just hacked them together into a single function. (If you know the maths it's not that dificult, I admit).

Now he has more time because he has passed his final secondary school exams, for which I wish to congratulate him.

But he has decided to do several things with his spare time. One of which is Mincecraft. The other? The VGA driver for the platform.

Yes, we already had text output, and that probably won't change in the near future, but what he is enabling here is much more than basic text printing. Basically the bootloader configures you to use VGA text mode, which enables you to write characters to a location somewhere in memory. Now that a driver is coming up, we still be writing to this buffer, be it in another location, only god (and my paging code) knows where in physical memory. But once this is done, what he can do, is start focussing on drawing shapes to screen. Such as rectangles, triangles and circles.

Now that sounds fantastic and all, we've got graphics working, or ... do we?

Technically, yes, but don't get too impressed. I still don't know anything about resolution, but for all I know VGA is basically crappy, not being able to go over 640x480, at, what was it? 256 or 16 colours.

Now this is nice and all, but it doesn't really have my priority. I'm more worried about getting the source code in a new layout, which enables me to make a difference between the compressed image (or nano kernel. Yes I'm changing the terminology here) and the core image on basis of path, in contrast to a complex, hard to notice, easy to forget while writing ifdef structure.

This is actually the reason why you see these huge spikes in the impact graphs on github. It basically boils down to the entire project being assigned a new location, which generates a huge impact, while in reality, nothing changes in the content. It's a mere process of copying and removing.

I am going to have to do some work on the makefiles though, and I probably am not going to like doing so. The make files need to get more scalable, as I know that they aren't exactly doing so as of now.

But is your elf code done?

Well, no.

I needed to get my loaf away from it for a second. Making the project more scalable had a higher priority than elf code. Despite the elf code being half done. This is due to the fact that I'm no longer the sole developer of this project and I need to make it possible to give the other developer(s) all the space they need.

I still don't know where I should put Stevens drivers for example. The drivers could be necessary for the nano kernel, since the drivers need to be installed from unreal mode, and the core image can't go there any more (unless you have 3,5 gigs or more). I could also do v8086 mode, but I feel like that could pose security issues.

I still haven't figured it out yet, but I'm working on it. Fortunately with a new developer.

Is it me, or has it been a while?

It's not you. It indeed has been a while and it is all due to the fact that this week is exam week at school. Those things require my attention a little more than the kernel.

So you've done nothing to the kernel since last update?

Well, that's not entirely true. I've been reading the Elf32 specifications and have managed to pull some more info from the Elf headers. Among which is a segment with a type number that doesn't appear to make sense according to the specifications.

However, after doing some googling I found out that Linux uses its own types. One of those is a stack segment, in which the kernel is specified to reserve room for the stack. In normal circumstances that's nice, but since my kernel sets up its own stack I'm just going to ignore this segment.

As for the rest?

Well I've been redoing my printhex function so that it now prints numbers in every base in the range from 2 to 36. All printf has to do now is call this printnum function with the number (named index), base, a boolean called signed and a boolean for capital characters.

So I guess that's all.

Well, not entirely. I have also changed the layout of the Orion project itself. Andromeda now no longer is merged into the Orion source tree. It rather is imported as sub-module. This means that when you import the Orion source tree, all you get is a .gitmodules file and a bunch of empty directories.

You then have to do git submodule init; git submodule update; to get the sources from the sub-projects.

Now that's all.

And what can we expect for the future?

Well, school is about to break up for the summer, which renders me a lot of spare time. I'll be spending some of that spare time in the woods with my dog, and some of that time in France. I will also be spending some of that time on the project, so don't worry about that.

I think the summer break up will give me more time to do work on the project so you might see the impact graphs show a lot more impact.

What? Nothing new?

Well, according to my dictionary elves are typically irritating little things, and that is exactly the way Elf loading turns out to be. A whole heap of irritating little things.

So I've been busy for sure, but I also have school and other things to keep working on, so unfortunately this one feature will return to this weeks sprint, and I have a very irritating little feeling that it will continue to come back to the next sprint for a while.

This basically means we have to put up with the slowing development for a while. If I have to choose between school and this project, I'll definitely opt for school, and as it turns out, that is exactly the choice I have to make this weekend.

I don't expect to do a lot this week, because all the work I do is really the time I have left when all of my spare time is divided.

I have hacked together a little document on scheduling though. It can be found at humane hours (from 7:00 through 23:00 GMT) behind this link.