The first week of classes seemed to go okay. I'm excited about exchanging code with students using Subversion. Not for group projects, mind you, but in place of downloading my support code and stubs, then emailing back their solutions.
Today I've been toying with GeekOS, trying to increase my understanding, and look for other projects to do with it. When I was taking and teaching OS at Maryland, I recall doing much lower-level projects: video and keyboard drivers, getting the task switching code to work, etc. Finally understanding the task switching mechanism was a big eureka moment, I believe. I kept trying to figure out how to jump to the next task in the queue, when really what you do is return to it. From the point of view of each task, it makes a call to the Yield() function, and then sometime later, returns from it. The whole trick is to do the context and stack switch and make the call from one task return to another.
Anyway, GeekOS seems to be designed for higher-level projects now, because the video, keyboard, and task-switching code is all in place from the start. But of course, that doesn't prevent me from clearing it away, down to just the bootstrap code, and taking my students along on that journey.
Next week, I'm going to talk about PC video modes, and how to write characters and attributes (colors) to video memory. So today I started playing with basic VGA modes, the simplest standard one being 320x200 with 256 colors, also known as mode 13h. I imported some bitmap font code from the Linux console drivers, hacked on the screen.c driver a bit, and now I have GeekOS running in VGA:
That's a 6x11 font, and seemed to be the best-looking choice with the limited resolution and non-square pixels of mode 13h. But it's parameterized well enough that I can change a few definitions and employ other fonts stolen from Linux. Here's a more typical 8x8:
Kind of deliciously chunky, and takes me back to those early days of the PC, when many graphical programs had text that looked about like this. Linux also has a 4x6 font, which is pretty much unreadable, but at least you get 80 columns:
(All of the screen-shots are shown here at 67%, so click through to see the actual size.)
