March 27, 2010

gcc4ti and TiEmu

Yay, I got gcc4ti compiled and installed on my PowerMac. It wasn't as painful as I thought it might be (though it required running as root just to compile). It did take quite awhile to finish, since this machine runs at only 400 MHz...

Anyway, I also have TiEmu running on this box; I compiled that a few months ago. So what this all means is that I can continue writing Punix!

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that TiEmu can run at full speed at about 40% CPU usage on my PowerMac:
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
13205 christop 20 0 60892 31m 19m R 39.7 3.1 3:52.70 tiemu

On my 300 MHz Pentium II laptop, TiEmu runs at about one-fifth of full speed. Go PowerPC!

March 22, 2010

Punix is hibernating

I know it's been several months since the last real update. I've been really busy with school, work, and taking care of my pregnant wife. I'm trying to get back into developing Punix, particularly the filesystem, and I've been studying how the VFS works in Linux (it's much more straight-forward than the VFS implementations in BSD systems).

My only working computer right now is an old PowerMac running Debian, and I haven't had time to get TIGCC or GCC4TI compiled and working on it to continue developing Punix. This means I'll probably end up writing a lot of code that won't compile at first, until I get TIGCC or GCC4TI working, or until I get another computer running Fedora or something. I'll also probably write a lot of code in the "sim" directory to test it out natively on my desktop before adapting it to work in Punix. I've done this in the past to test out algorithms for the scheduler and the flash (FlashROM) block device driver.