[Lenny400] L4Re/Fiasco.OC on the Letux 400 (update)

[Paul Boddie]

Hello again,

Just to update anyone that may still be reading this list, I have worked a bit 
more on L4Re-based software for the Letux 400 and have produced a distribution 
of components:

http://www.boddie.org.uk/paul/Landfall.html

This builds on the actual porting effort that I mentioned earlier:

http://www.boddie.org.uk/paul/L4Re-Fiasco.OC.html

I haven't really expanded hardware support so much since my last message. In 
fact, the most exciting thing about this now is that it supports the keyboard, 
which isn't really very exciting, particularly as I haven't managed to 
integrate the components with the L4Re event framework (which seems to be 
based on code imported from some version of Linux).

But in one of the demonstrations you can type things and the key labels and 
values appear in their own framebuffer regions, with the matrix and physical 
key positions also being shown in their own regions (demonstrating things like 
ghosting). It is also possible to use key combinations to play with the 
backlight.

Most of the recent work has gone into restructuring the code, making it a 
separate repository, and trying to adhere to L4Re conventions, with plenty of 
time being spent fighting the API in this latter area. I still need to get 
dynamic linking to work automatically with "shared" executables, but since I 
have spent some time playing successfully with dlopen, I suppose I will 
eventually figure it out.

Another achievement of sorts was getting the framebuffer terminal program to 
act like the serial console, which means that elementary debugging finally 
became possible. Of course, this isn't so helpful if the components being 
debugged involve the display, but there are still plenty of other applications 
for this feature.

If you are in the unlikely position of following this list and the l4-hurd 
list, you may have seen me post messages there. I still think that L4-based 
systems could deliver a general-purpose Free Software system, and my intention 
was to alert people to the current state of the L4 scene. But at the very 
least, it is interesting to have this as a testing environment for things like 
driver development.

I hope this was vaguely interesting to someone, anyway.

Paul