06.22.10
Still Here
The short story is it has been a long year.
I spent the last 13 months working on Linux for Palm, Inc. I’m still doing it, though at the end of the month Palm will no longer exist and will become part of HP. There are interesting things on the horizon, but that’s not what this blog is about…
Despite the lack of activity here, the Monarc kernel is alive and well. I’ve been keeping things going, adding new features and fixing bugs. There kernel is developing quite nicely, especially in the areas of the VMM. But as if there aren’t enough things to do, I recently dusted off the source to my PowerPC emulator, which runs on the first version of this kernel, and tested it out for nostalgia.
Surprisingly it runs extremely well … in VMware. I used to use VMware to debug the system, but a guest OS was never usable when running in VMware; I imagine the self-modifying code of the instruction translator is a bear to keep up with. VMware Fusion 3.1 runs it like a champ, however; and it may be even more usable than it was running directly on hardware of a few years ago.
Naturally, after seeing the old project running so nicely, I had to start porting the emulator to the latest kernel. I’m making fast progress, but there is still much to do. One thing I’m happy about is getting rid of the user space drivers for disk and input. Having those drivers in user space was convenient when the kernel did not a driver framework, but things are different now and for the better.
Overall, progress is being made. I’ll try to keep up with the progress here a little better. There are some technical topics that I have in mind to cover also, which I think will be useful to others.