Not much of a gain in terms of usability (a bit of a loss in fact, things are
a bit slow and glitchy), but it's a necessary move if we want to use upcoming
grid-enabled userspace apps, such as a visual text editor.
Sending the escape after its target made things complicated for upcoming
stuff I want to add. Although it makes `recv.asm` slightly larger, it's really
worth it.
I implement the screen using XCB which is much more friendly
than z80e's SDL+CMake for development machines that want to install
minimal dependencies (for example, a port-less OpenBSD rig).
That's my mega-commit you've all been waiting for.
The code for the shell share more routines with userspace apps than with kernel
units, because, well, its behavior is that of a userspace app, not a device
driver.
This created a weird situation with libraries and jump tables. Some routine
belonging to the `kernel/` directory felt weird there.
And then comes `apps/basic`, which will likely share even more code with the
shell. I was seeing myself creating huge jump tables to reuse code from the
shell. It didn't feel right.
Moreover, we'll probably want basic-like apps to optionnally replace the shell.
So here I am with this huge change in the project structure. I didn't test all
recipes on hardware yet, I will do later. I might have broken some...
But now, the structure feels better and the line between what belongs to
`kernel` and what belongs to `apps` feels clearer.
Instead of expecting a `USER_CODE` symbol to be set, we expect `.org` to be
set in all userspace glue code. This gives us more flexibility with regards to
how we manage that.
Moreover, instead of making `USER_RAMSTART` mandatory, we make it default to
the end of the binary, which is adequate in a majority of cases.
Will be useful for my upcoming mega-commit... :)
Most of register fiddling routines (which is now the only thing contained
in care.asm) are used by almost all userspace apps, often in inner loops.
That makes the penalty of using jump tables for those a bit too high.
Moreover, it burdens jump tables needlessly.
Because this unit is very small (now that string routines are out), it makes
sense to always include it in binaries.
This was mostly lifted from my "tihello" example, but it required significant
adjustments.
This commit also introduces a font management system. A lot of fonts are
available online, but sources aren't always clear so to avoid copyright
landmines, I re-created my first 5x7 font from scratch.
As it is now, this resulting ROM gets "Collapse OS>" to be displayed on the
LCD screen. Much work still left to do.
ref #41
We use zasm's ability to use labels in .equ directive.
We didn't do it before because for a while, we were in between scas
and zasm (scas was used in automated tests) so we needed to use the
lowest common denominator: zasm doesn't have macros and scas can't
use labels in .equ directives.
This forced us to add this layer of indirection. But now that we are
completely cut from scas' dependency, we can use this nice zasm's
ability.
The goal is to avoid mixing those routines with "character devices"
(acia, vpd, kbd) which aren't block devices and have routines that
have different expectations.
This is a first step to fixing #64.
Yup, that's ultimately why I've just made this whole big zasm
refactoring in the previous commits. To allow for this.
But also, zasm is in much better shape now...
Needed if we want to compile the kernel and zasm from within a SD card.
I didn't go straight for 32-bit because it was significantly more
complex and 24-bit give us 16M. Enough to go on for a while...
A new app to stress test the SD card driver. Also, accompanying this
commit, changes solidifying the SD card driver so that stress tests
actually pass :)
This huge refactoring remove the Seek and Tell routine from blockdev
implementation requirements and change GetC and PutC's API so that they
take an address to read and write (through HL/DE) at each call.
The "PTR" approach in blockdev implementation was very redundant from
device to device and it made more sense to generalize. It's possible
that future device aren't "random access", but we'll be able to add more
device types later.
Another important change in this commit is that the "blockdev handle" is
now opaque. Previously, consumers of the API would happily call routines
directly from one of the 4 offsets. We can't do that any more. This
makes the API more solid for future improvements.
This change forced me to change a lot of things in fs, but overall,
things are now simpler. No more `FS_PTR`: the "device handle" now holds
the active pointer.
Lots, lots of changes, but it also feels a lot cleaner and solid.
Move load/save to blkdev_cmds and add a new "poke" builtin shell cmd
that is the mirror of "peek" and strictly uses stdio (no blkdev
involved).
This allows us to slim the minimal OS size but, more importantly, change
the behavior of "load" so that we don't expect GetC to block until Z is
set. This way, using "load X" with X being larger than the blkdev size
won't block forever.
This also brings our RC2014 minimal kernel below the 1K mark again.
The pgm module implements a shell hook so that when an unknown command
is typed, we look into the mounted filesystem and look for a file with
the same name as the command. If we find one, we load it in memory and
run it.
This will soon allow use to seek and tell on input, which is necessary
for a second pass which is necessary for forward symbol references.
This require making `blkSel` a bit more flexible. Rather than having one
global selected blkdev, each app can select its own, in its own memory
space.
