[vmips] VMIPS news for 31-Mar-2004

[Brian R. Gaeke]

VMIPS news for 31-Mar-2004
**************************

This update covers changes to the VMIPS CVS HEAD since 24-January.
Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to work on VMIPS at all in the
last few months... so this is a pretty short update. Here's hoping
for a less busy life with more free time. :-)

DEC serial device emulation
===========================

The DEC DZ11 serial device is supposed to support 4 serial lines --
previously, we were not really distinguishing between requests meant
for different lines.  The situation is now somewhat saner: now we try to
at least make sure that a client's transmission and receive interrupts
correspond to the currently selected transmit & receive line numbers.
I'm not very sure about the correctness of the interrupt support here,
yet.  I'm using the Linux dz driver, as well as a new test program in
sample_code/ttytest, to test it.

Configuration issues
====================

The default system-wide vmipsrc (what you get in $(sysconfdir) if you
'make install') can now be modified at configure time -- it's not yet,
though.

I'm transitioning away from using WORDS_BIGENDIAN and
TARGET_{BIG,LITTLE}_ENDIAN towards using machine->host_bigendian and the
new 'bigendian' runtime option, respectively.  For more on this front, see
the description of my (remaining, as yet uncommitted) patches here:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=884580&group_id=24697&atid=382183

vmipstool
=========

vmipstool has undergone some refactoring and reformatting; for more info, see
the commit message here:
http://www.dgate.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/vm/vmipstool.cc?rev=1.23&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

Documentation
=============

The documentation has been relicensed according to the MIT license.
I updated the to-do list and texi2pod, and cleaned up some of the text
files under doc/.  Makeoptdoc can now output in a style which is intended
to be compatible with vmipsrc comments, so that someone who wants to
edit a vmipsrc file will have plenty of documentation handy.

Bootloader
==========

After doing some archaeology with a DEC 5100 manual, I messed with
xmboot's default boot environment.  Perhaps now the 'console' and
'systype' variables have default values that make more sense now --
but it's hard to be sure! (If you try to boot ULTRIX on VMIPS, you get
a panic message due to unsupported systype. That's what led me up this
path.) Also, xmboot's little c library's printf call now
ignores field widths instead of barfing.

Share and Enjoy,
-Brian

-- 
Brian R. Gaeke, brg at dgate.org -- GnuPG encrypted mail gleefully accepted