March 14, 2010

Update, again

Hello folks,
Today a short report only. Markus Weiss was working intensively on getting OWB to compile and work on PPC targets. Of course, he succeeded! Thank you, Markus.
In my last post I've told you about some issues with setjmp/longjmp. The unaligned FPU double access, which crossed 16-byte boundary generates an alignment exception on PowerPC machines. My first fix was rather stupid one - alignment enforcement in setjmp and longjmp calls. Now, I wrote a special exception handler which takes care of misaligned data. It helped Markus a bit and make OWB work on Sam440EP.
Thanks to Markus work and his great fixes to the code, DHCP client does not enter an endless loop on Sam440 anymore. Now, setting network up on Samantha is a matter of few mouse clicks.
Stay tuned for more news. New ISO is on the way (I may tell you that its size increased again. Now it has 475 MB approximately).
PS. This blog entry was written on AROS running on Sam440EP in OWB browser :)

March 9, 2010

Any news?

Hello there.

Yup, typical me :) I made some fuzz about things being currently done (or not done) and then disappeared for a while. No information, no updates. Nothing :)I've been asked several times about the status update of AROS for sam440. Well, there are few changes which have happened to the whole AROS recently. We do have a changeable mouse pointers and they do work on Sam440. Since there are few of them delivered on the ISO, you may change the red triangle to something more Amiga-like, if you want to. A red mouse pointer with alpha blending and shadow? No problem. Start preferences, select the correct image and voilà!

Markus Weiss managed to compile OWB for PPC target and, if it works as expected, you will find it on the next ISO. Neil Cafferkey made some important improvements to the installer. Now, it installation on sam440 shall be simpler. Keep in mind the installation will be incomplete, since the AROS' slb (aka Parthenope) is not installed yet.

The changes local to Sam440 port include support for the onboard I²C bus. The RTC is used by the battclock.resource, so now you will see the correct time on AROS, provided your RTC is correctly set up. If not, you may use AROS' time preferences to adjust it. Additionally, few fixes for the setjmp/longjmp are made, so that the functions do not crash in case of unaligned jmp_buf pointer. Anything else? Ah yes, I'm working on the EHCI Poseidon driver for Sam440 AROS. Stay tuned :)

Screenshot? Here you have it. Nothing special in it. Just AROS on Sam440 in a bit higher resolution :)
Greetings from the German Aerospace Center :)