The console renderer now renders to a text buffer, which can be implemented
on any device, whether it's the VGA text buffer or a bitmap graphics device
with font rendering. This replaces the older code that could only render to
a VGA framebuffer and where the input parsing was tightly coupled with the
device rendering phase.
This enables useful features such as directories, CRC32 checksums, and other
useful features. The initrdfs in the kernel is now hooked up against the new
API, although the kernel's current limited FS support is a problem for now.
To work around that, directories are not supported at runtime, although the
internal API understands them wonderfully. This will be fixed when the
kernel gets a real VFS.
This provides control over the caching of memory, which makes write-combined
IO possible. Graphics drivers can use this to transfer data at a much higher
rate to the video memory.
The implementation is a bit hacky but it'll do for now. It provides enough
support for the experimental VBE driver to work on the real computers I
tested it on, even if the BIOS uses screwed up default MTRRs.
The virtual memory layer now automatically uses the PAT feature if available
but in a backwards compatible manner and otherwise just tries to approximate
PAT features if they are asked for.
sfork(2) now calls sforkr(2) with the current registers.
This will prove useful in creating threads, where user-space now can fully
control what state the child will start in. This is unlike the Linux clone
system call that accepts a pointer to the child stack; this is more powerful
and somehow simpler. Note that this will create a rather raw thread; no
thread initization has been done by the standard thread API (when it is
implemented), so this feature shouldn't be used by programmers unless they
know what they are doing.
fork(2) now calls sfork(2) directly. Also removed fork(2) and sfork(2) from
the kernel as they are done using sforkr(2) now. So technically they aren't
system calls right now, but that could always change.
sfork is much like rfork except sharing is default for everything.
Eventually, I'll make a rfork(3) wrapper function around sfork(2) to
provide compatibility to BSD programs.
I don't like Linux clone(2): that's some messy function.
Any detected COM ports available as /dev/comN.
It currently utilizes AGAIN to do polling in user-space. This prevents it
from locking up the whole system and makes it respond to the SIGINT hack.
There is also a more reliable and faster polling-blocking mode, but it locks
up the entire system.
The main interrupt mode is broken, perhaps by a bug in VirtualBox.
Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen