One door closes ...

... and another opens, in a never-ending corridor of closed doors. Or so it seems.

I managed to get at least some virtual memory stuff working. I can now create processes which have independent address spaces. Yay. After having to fix a lot of lazy coding errors along the way too. Hmm.

And i've got some initial process startup code done. It can initialise the 'exec' library for use by the process before it calls the entry point - from this it will then eventually access all other resources on the system. I'm still working on some of these mechanisms, but it'll do for a start. What makes these things tricky is the virtual memory (and memory protection), for example I can only easily pass a few registers to the initial entry point, unless I add a lot of messy page mapping stuff to pre-load the stack or data space. And I can't call anything inside exec until the structures are setup, so it all has to be done manually (i.e. prone to error). So i'm getting by with 2 arguments; real entry point, and the start of a 16kb block of pre-allocated application memory. Once exec is setup, the startup code can then use various calls to get arguments and whatnot if it needs them - which will be stored in the in-kernel process object.

But, with one hurdle out of the way, another pops up. I have to get message passing working again since all memory is now effectively process-private. I guess I will have to go with some sort of system call to allocate messages in a memory space that can be accessed by all processes (eventually moved amongst them), although I can probably hide that behind the memory allocation interface (MEMF_PUBLIC allocation flag, or so). I'd like any solution to work reasonably efficiently for intra-process message passing too, but I have a feeling that'll probably just about fall out of any solution anyway.

I still need to work out how i'm going to bring up the whole system too - the initial setup of all 'internal' libraries and devices and so on; if there ever is any that is.

One step at a time.