The dust is settling

While the dust of the cosmic collision starts to settle we're still a long way away from the total merge of the projects.

At the moment it's more the drivers that are being implemented in the Andromeda kernel. Michel is the one responsible for that.

In the mean time Steven feels like he can't do a thing since the change is going so rapidly.

And me, what am I doing?

Well, I'm primarily focussing on the same stuff as before the merge and that is getting the paging system up to par. At the moment work is being done on the basics of the paging system and while I feel it isn't sufficient in the long run (when this might be ported to 64 bits systems) for now it'll do and will probably even be good (according to the standards we're working with now).

So what is going to change?

To start with work is being done on drivers such as Intel's Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller or APIC. In the mean time work also is being done on ACPI or Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (which is a disaster to work with). That is what is imported from Openloader.

In the mean time we're also taking over the Openloader boot procedure and this is also a work in progress.

Also we're doing work on getting the kernel into higher half, which is where the new paging system comes in. It has to support identity paging which is that the same page can be referenced by multiple virtual addresses. This, in combination with relocatable code and a whole lot of rather simple arithmetic on relocating the heap, will allow us to relocate the entire kernel into the 3GiB region or the -2 GiB region on AMD 64 systems.

Work also is being done on the graphics systems, but that is basically what has been going on all the time since Steven joined, and we're looking to merge the makefiles.

The heap code had some significant bugs, which are now resolved, but no guarantees can be given that it is now bug free.

So while the dust is settling, the merging is far from complete and the legacy of the two projects will probably remain visible for months, if not years to come.