The previous approach of maintaining R> and W> pointers was
conceptually simple, but made INT handler code actually quite
complex.
Now, we maintain indexes instead. It's much easier to perform
bounds checks and to compare for equality, something we have to
do quick in the INT handler.
it seems I left my asm argument harmonization half done here.
Instructions list at B208 doesn't correspond to many actual
mnemonics. This mnemonic here was the worst offender.
I've changed my mind about having documentation in-system. It doesn't
serve much of a purpose and make blkfs significantly heavier.
This commit is the first step in writing a documentation outside of
the blkfs.
Previously, it could never write more than a few bytes before pingpong
getting a mismatch error. Now, I can pingpong Collapse OS binary
without a mismatch.
It's a bit more inconvenient in terms of register protection (BC
is much more generally useful than IY), but it makes tight spots
such as next and execute much faster, so I think it's worth it.
The 1 byte limitation has been effective for a while now, but I
hadn't made the move yet, I wanted to see if the limitation would
cause me problems. It doesn't.
Doing this now slightly facilitates the IY->BC move in z80.
Bootstrapping: if you try to recreate the CVM binary from the
previous commit with this code, you'll have bootstrapping problems.
The first bootstrap will compile a binary with 2-bytes wide cells
but branching conditionals that yields 1-byte cells. That's bad.
I got around the issue by temporarily inserting a "397 399 LOADR"
instruction in cvm/xcomp.fs, right before the xcomp overrides. This
way, I force 1-byte cells everywhere on the first compiliation,
which then allows me to apply the logic change in cvm/vm.c and have
a properly running binary.
There is now no more actual code in stable ABI, only references.
This makes refactoring of this code much easier. For example,
changing IY to BC as the IP register.
Only its jump at 0x33 remains.
I've also fixed a strange offset oddity in 8086's (n) placement.
It was off by 2, but strangely, it ran properly. Anyway, now it's
fixed.
Previously, it was impossible to cross-compile Collapse OS from a
binary-offsetted Collapse OS because stable ABI wordrefs would have
a wrongly offsetted address.
This solves the problem by replacing those wordrefs by direct,
hardcoded stable ABI offset references.
So far, I hadn't managed to run those tools properly on OpenBSD. I
was too confused by its stty peculiarities. I'm still confused, but
at least I managed to make them work... most of the time...
Driver configuration don't need their own words at runtime, we only
need to compile them as literals when compiling words.
Now that we have this "declaration blocks" pattern emerging, it
seems like a good idea to take advantage of this in drivers, both
for simplifying the xcomp unit and to make final binary slimmer.
Initially, I used the same letters as those used in the z80 ref
docs, but it makes the different assemblers harder to use than they
should. Having consistent "argtype" rules across assemblers should
help.
