News onthe kernel 1.14.x

["Konrad M.Kokoszkiewicz" <draco@mi.com.pl>]

Hello,

last weekend I spent dealing on the MiNT kernel, especially on its VM
extension. Trying to fix it, I changed the assembler part so that it used
BIOS logical mode instead of physical reading/writing data using Rwabs().
Surprisingly, it made it more stable! Though VM is not fixed so far, some
things became more clean. The VM behaviour is still a bit ridiculous, but
I think, if somebody (esp. Sven) would decide to sit and fix it
completely, this may help:

1) After a cold restart, when the MiNT welcome message appears, two bombs
come on the screen. Now, if you do a WARM restart (Ctrl/Alt/Del), the VM
will initialize and start. It was completely unpredictable before.

2) VM actually works, but crashes after some time. I wonder if Sven ever
decides to put patched pager to his page as he has promised before
vacations...

3) VM works with HDDRIVER! Before, it started only with AHDI. And I think
it may be a reason for a generally better stability (HDDRIVER is less
buggy - perhaps).

Generally, because the VM may be still used only for some experiments
leading to get it to work, I added a new section to the makefile. Now
three kernels will be produced:

mint.prg - 68000 version
mint030.prg - 68030 version
mintvmx.prg - 68030 version with VM extension.

All three binaries are supplied in the archive I have put today to my
webpage (http://www.orient.uw.edu.pl/~conradus/docs/mint.html).

Besides, the Harry's pexec() patch has been applied and other slight
changes have been done (all documented in changes.mh).

Due to these changes, I bumped the PL number up, so it is now 1.14.4.

Regards

Konrad M.Kokoszkiewicz

mail:draco@nidus.mi.com.pl
     draco@irc.pl
     draco@piwo.bl.pg.gda.pl
     conradus@avanti.orient.uw.edu.pl
     conradus@plearn.edu.pl
     draco@nuova.id.uw.edu.pl
http://www.orient.uw.edu.pl/~conradus/
 IRC:[Draco]

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