After many trials and errors in reliably accessing AVR chips through
my SPI relay design, I resigned myself to accepting 125kHz communication
speed with it. I find the complexity of solutions allowing to keep 250kHz
speeds to be excessive.
Adding a delay such as the 20ms one we have in AVR programmer's
initialization routine is tricky without a word like TICKS.
This implementation is highly inaccurate, but more accurate and
reliable than a "ballpark" DO..LOOP...
Also, move doc to doc/asm.txt.
Also, fix the pcat recipe which was broken since the overlay change.
I hadn't noticed it because I didn't have to rebuild the MBR.
The idea is to consider assemblers as "runtime" apps instead of
placing them in the "bootstrap" section of the blocks. These apps
will be used for much more than bootstrapping.
Moved its documentation to doc/asm.txt and made its code blocks
more compact.
The ":" now takes care of scanning for ";". Conceptually, having
";" as an immediate word is slightly simpler than the approach in
this commit, but when bootstrapping is involved, this simpler
approach gets murkier.
Moreover, it got even murkier-er when trying to de-stabilize EXIT,
so here we are.
This duplicated feature existed because of bootstrapping issues
with LIT", but again, with careful threading, we can clean things
up.
We can now have a proper "Collapse OS" prompt :)
When writing the xcomp documentation, I realized that with careful
threading and by accepting a bit of code duplication in the xcomp
toolset, I could de-stabilize a couple of words.
(n) and EXIT are a bit trickier, but I think it can be done. It
would be nice to get rid of stable wordrefs...
Working on programming AVR chips exposes a glaring omission in my
first design of the SPI Relay: not allowing multiple devices make
this task hard. I constantly have to unplug my SD card before, plug
the AVR chip holder, then play a bit, then unplug the AVR holder,
then replug the SD card...
My prototype for a SPI relay design is built, but I haven't tested
it yet. I need to adapt the code first, which is what I do here.
When the prototype is tested, I'll update the SDC recipe with a new
schema.
Although the SPI Relay driver is RC2014-specific, the SD Card driver
is generic enough to be a subsystem. That's the second subsystem we
add and this warrants, I think, the formalization of a new concept:
protocols.
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.
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.
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.
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.
