January 31, 2010

Oh, Samantha!

Hi there!

Samantha is back! After long period of hibernation in the AROS repository Sam440 port of AROS is maintained again. Big thanks to Markus Weiss, who has restarted it and to ACube who gave me the kick in the butt :)

Since the kernel.resource in AROS did evolved a bit since last time I was writing it form Sam, it has been updated a tiny bit now. Most of the features from Efika's kernel have been back-ported to Sam440 port, including:

  • Loading and releasing of symbols from every ELF file loaded by AROS, including the kernel itself,
  • System call for cold reboot (accessible only from kernel.resource and exec.library),
  • Crash handler displays detailed information, including the byte offset of crash occurrence, relevant symbol name (if such name exists at all) and the executable name. The log includes also the backtrace (with offsets, symbol and module names) which tries to reach as far as possible.

Yes, I do know, it's not much. But it is at least a good start (eerm.... rather a good re-birth?) :).

The Sam440 port has been not only extended, but also fixed a bit. I have found there an ancient bug in the exception handler. It could have lead to random system crashes. The reason was the exception handler itself. There was a risk that an interrupt will occur during reconstruction of the CPU context.

Since the AMCC440EP CPU does not maintain cache coherency (no, it's not a bug, it's a feature fairly well documented in the manuals!), some portions of the code had to be fixed. Now, more AROS code uses CachePreDMA and CachePostDMA pair of functions. Because of that partitions on harddrive are recognised properly now. AROS on Sam440 boots nicely and coexists with OS4.1 on the same harddrive. Nice, isn't it?

Now, the last but not least, after some sleepless nights the OHCI driver of Poseidon is fixed and operates properly on Sam440ep. Wanna proof? Watch the attached screenshot :)

Stay tuned for more news. I promise to write a bit more now ;)


15 Comments:

Blogger Dammy said...

Nice to see you posting again, Dr. Schulz.

10:58 PM  
Blogger Paolo Besser said...

So you're basically saying that SAM's USB 2.0 ports are better supported on AROS than on OS4.1?

11:09 PM  
Blogger Michal Schulz said...

No, I'm not saying it. The EHCI support (USB2.0) is not enabled. Yet... ;)

11:19 PM  
Blogger pain said...

Any chance of nightly builds (and for Efika too). Perhaps ACube (andsGenesi) could supply some servers

2:24 PM  
Blogger L'Italiano said...

any iso available?

6:38 PM  
Blogger Michal Schulz said...

The iso will be available soon. I need to do few tests first. Give me a week please.

6:46 PM  
Blogger weissms said...

Thx for continuing your sam efforts. I wouldn't have been able to make the
progress you did in the last 2 weeks,
not in the next half year. Just lacking the knowledge and time as well.

Markus

7:05 PM  
Blogger Michal Schulz said...

Markus,

I appreciate your work done on Sam440 port! Do not underestimate yourself. I feel perfectly great knowing that I'm not the only one who works on Sam440 port of AROS. You are doing great work!

7:13 PM  
Blogger L'Italiano said...

of course, just asking...

11:00 PM  
Blogger Nube said...

nice to hear that ;-) i hope to try it as soon as possible :-). What kind of filesystem support aros ? i' d like to create an hard drive partition to share music, files and whatelse between aros and amiga os 4.1.1 :-)

11:15 PM  
Blogger Michal Schulz said...

Use either FFS, or SFS (recommended). Both OS4 and AROS read SFS partitions flawlessly.

11:21 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

As a sam440ep (non flex owner) I think this is very good news.

I was looking for details about the sam port last weekend but could not find them as I wanting to try it out but I could not find an ISO or details about the port on the main AROS websites, so its good to hear the port is not dead.

1:53 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

>the AMCC440EP CPU does not maintain cache coherency (no, it's not a bug, it's a feature fairly well documented in the manuals!)

I'd rather call that a lack of feature...

4:11 PM  
Blogger Icy EyeG said...

I know this is a bit off-topic, but why is it that the SAM and EFIKA builds of AROS aren't included in http://aros.sourceforge.net/download.php ?

7:08 PM  
Blogger Nube said...

is there any news about aros and sam? :-)

12:46 AM  

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