DEV-DIARIES
Dev Diary 2015-03-13
After a bit of a hiatus (that included an Epic Ambient Battle), I’m back
to work. My cold-boot qemu image is having trouble connecting to the
local file server, from which it should pull the remaining necessary
files (ie fonts). This isn’t an arrangement I’d like to keep - it’s one
thing to have a remote file system to pick up user files, quite another
to rely on it to pull files required for the thing to work. It’s got
me digging around net/ethernet.lisp, which, to my delight, is
readable, but hardcodes a lot of network assumptions, as well as not
distinguishing between the OSI layers (DNS is not part of the Ethernet
standards, last I checked). Since a good organizational scheme can make
dealing with a large codebase much easier, I’m thinking of how to break
down the sys.net subsystem (right now I have in mind something like
sys.net.dns, but I’m not married to the idea (yet)). I’m going to survey
other software distributions and see what works well (and what doesn’t).
I hope I’ll have something I can start working on tomorrow (as well as
having the qemu image in a state where I can do some more interesting
work).
I’ve also started reading the Intel Architecture manual, hoping to get a better understanding of the machine layer (kind of essential for this project). I don’t see NiceBSD moving beyond x86-64 anytime soon, and there’s a lot of milestones to hit before even contemplating another architecture (such as ARM or Sparc64).