Floppy Driver

[noxer]

Create driver for "M35FD".
http://dcpu.com/floppy-drive/

[rustyoz]

is this going to be just to abstract the hardware interrupts to kernel calls or include the file system?

[noxer]

It will abstract the hardware and offer a device file for accessing the floppy disk.

[aponigricon]

Oh, wait is the goal to avoid abstractions, or transparency? Or are you guys trying to abstract everything completely? D:

[noxer]

Device files are a great way to offer an unique interface for all kinds of hardware.

[aponigricon]

But wait a second... device files require a file system... which is an abstraction...

Well, my point is that Atlas 2 would be a lot smarter if it could run mere programs written in pure DASM-16 without any... "oddities", such as funny system subroutines, or having to access memory through a system of files and directories. What I'm implying is an exokernel... c'mon at least a partial one 😁

[noxer]

You mean every application should use its own fs and hardware drivers? Why? We define an interface so all applications have access to all devices (without knowing much about them).

[aponigricon]

Nononono 😧

What I'm implying is, that the applications should only be given as many available resources as it craves. For example, a process should only be given abstractions such as for example system interrupts, file system access, or device drivers when it tells the system that it wants them. This could for example be done by the process by including a library of some kind (.DLL?), or having some specific data in the applications file header.
I just think that Atlas 2 would be much more useful to people if they could run raw DCPU-16 programs without having to translate it into something Atlas-compatible first. 😉

[noxer]

You don't need to "translate" it. The OS runs raw programs. There must be some kind of API anyways. You can write wrapper libraries that offer this functionality (and the ABI will include a way of defining them at compile time, so you don't need to load them yourself).

[aponigricon]

Sigh... let me just suggest stuff as we work through this, k? 😉

[noxer]

I encourage you to do so! My plans for Atlas 2 are not perfect but this was one of the parts where all the user space concept rely on. One of the problems in AtlasOS was, that we would have to rewrite large parts of the API when we add new features (new storage media, network connection). I wanted to get rid of that necessity. Thats why I am so rigid in this.