We're live!; memory manager update; more info on PCI

As of last night, AWOS is now officially live on Google Code's SVN repository. That's right, we're finally open-source! (see it at http://awos.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/)

I had a terrible time last night as my OS was triple faulting. (Harkens back to days of yore trying to get into PMode.) Found out that my fault handler was reading CR1, and that's a reserved register. Yay! No more triple fault. Boo! Page fault.

So obviously my paging code is still buggy. CR2=0x400000, which means it's trying to access exactly 4MB into memory (the start of Page Directory #2) so it's not doing something right.

PCI: Well a piece of it is being able to detect any PCI card from the planet super fast from a comprehensive database. I estimate that it would take <= 5 seconds to detect any card's make, model, and type. I'm pretty sure that Windows takes longer than that, and I'm not even using PnP. Besides, this is *ANY* card (I have a source than can give me all the vendor IDs and card IDs), even some that Windows hasn't even heard of.

First post; current info

I decided earlier today that my OS will be open source, under an Apache 1-like license. This was a big step for me; I wasn't sure if I wanted to be closed or open. I figured that open source:

• makes people happy;
• allows other people to find (and even possibly fix) bugs;
• and makes it more open for other people to join me in this project.
  

Right now I'm working on my hard disk driver. It seems that the way I have it coded the drive never becomes ready. It just sits there at a "while" loop.

Also, I dug up my old 486 Compaq ProLinea 4/50 for my test computer again. So I got to see my new memory manager running on a real computer for the first time tonight. That makes me happy. :)

In other news, I'm planning a big announcement soon about a very important component: PCI. I won't tell you what yet, but I can tell you it will probably revolutionize the way we work with PCI hardware.

Well I best be off to code. Until next time...