2010-07-18 - Makefiles!

Going to put some time this morning into figuring out the mysteries of Makefiles.  Given that my OS will very soon have multiple moving parts, I think it would be good to have one which will allow me to build specific sections.

2010-07-16 - More Library Loading

Finally spotted the stupid mistake which was causing my library initialisation to fail.  The initialisation function attempts to write out a debug string to indicate its progress, however, it called the Panic function before the module level variable had been set up, so it was calling a function of a NULL pointer ... doh!

Having fixed the stupidity, the library is loading, initialising, finding the printf function, and displaying a string.  \ o /

2010-07-12 - ELF Library Loading

A significant effort over the last two days, and I believe the ELF loader is finished.  The sections are loading correctly, the symbols are being found and processed, and the relocations appear to be complete.  Some debugging still needs to be done on the whole thing as attempting to call the library initialise function results in the code spinning off into the weeds and causing issues.  Oh well, that's an effort for another day.

Whoever said that ELF was easier than COFF was either stupid, lying, or has never dealt with COFF.  It's so much more straightforward because it's not built with millions of extensibility plans.  One symbol table, one section table, one relocation table, one string table ... thank you very much.

2010-07-01 - ELF Loading

To summarise the last month, I've been looking on-and-off at getting the ELF loader working.  I also found that the data store for my MemoryManager was not being cleared on initialisation (bad when booting in from DOS).  Additionally, it seems my kernel is much bigger than I thought, and setting the boot disk image to be at 0x17E00 isn't enough.  Oh well, another few K should fix it for now.