Yeah, the title says enough, I'm afraid.
I think it would be an understatement to say that we found SOME bugs last summer break. We found a lot.
First up was a series of bugs related to the fact that the ELF loader didn't fully comply with the standards. Once that was found it was an easy fix.
Further, what we've unearthed is quite an impressive bug, this bug is related to the paging system, which by the way, is by no means finished yet.
It's this last bug that I've been working on since a while and the last several days I've been getting some small clues of where the bug could be.
At first we thought it could be a memset issue, but by replacing the current memset with a simpler one, we eliminated that as the possible and most obvious cause.
We then continued with some other obvious culprit which was the memory allocation system, which we started testing. During these tests we figured out that the allocator wasn't the issue.
This led me to thinking about the issue in a new light. From the paging perspective, and so I did a little test, to figure out where in memory this bug starts.
As it turns out, once we enter a level of memory above a certain number, we cause page-faults, which in turn cause more page-faults, and so forth.
This issue is probably due to the way I approach paging, but it leads to the more interesting question. What is precisely going wrong, since without knowing that, we can't fix the issue.
That's what we're doing now, so we probably won't meet this sprints target, but that doesn't really matter, as the bugs resolved will have a way higher priority.
That's it for now,
Hope you had a nice summer break, and see you next post.
