[movitz-devel] OS decisions

[Robert Swindells]

Brian Makin wrote:
>>>> What kind of file system? or use an existing one?
>>>
>>> I think an existing one would be fine.
>>
>> One option is to port LMFS from the MIT sources to Common Lisp.
>>
>> Robert Swindells

>Other than versioning LMFS doesn't look too different from modern FS.

Except that it is written in Lisp and designed to work in a single
address space.

It won't be as efficent but can probably be made to do something
useful much faster than starting from scratch to copy another
filesystem.

>I'm just kind of thrashing around trying to find a place I can  
>effectively contribute :)

There are plenty of places to contribute. What kind of thing do you
want to work on ? Something at a high or low level ?

High Level:

Pick up code from SBCL or CMUCL for the top level file and io functions.

Do same for Simple Streams to add device-read and device-write, don't
need the helper functions read-octets and write-octets though.

Low Level:

Modern PCs don't use the 8259 interrupt controller, they use the LAPIC
and use ACPI to work out which interrupts are generated by which
device. Someone could start looking at parsing the ACPI tables within
Movitz.

The interrupt handling sequence might benefit from some changes too, I
guess you could install a closure as the handler but it could be
simpler to pass some object as an argument to the handler function.

Robert Swindells
--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?