Various things

I've been cooking up some new stuff for VSTa of late. First, at the urging
of one of the newest VSTa sites, I wrote an RS-232 driver, fixed up login,
fixed a couple C library bugs, and am running VSTa in a true multi-user
configuration for the first time.

I have also assembled a much-requested "standalone boot" kit so you can
boot up a basic VSTa configuration without having to rebuild the world
from scratch. This kit was first assembled when I was shopping for a laptop
and wanted to check for compatibility--it all fits on a floppy, so I could
just boot off the floppy and verify keyboard/screen/disk. If you want to
check it out, it's ftp.cisco.com:vandys/vsta/stand*. The shell used is
from bin/testsh; it's not much of an interactive shell, but it's pretty
good for messing around with messages, mount points, etc.

Finally, I've started work on debugger support. The kernel will provide
peek/poke, breakpoints, read/write registers, plus optionally the ability
to cause the program to breakpoint on each syscall and each signal. The
interface will work for multi-threaded programs, which adds a certain amount
of challenge to the coding task. I'm going to bring it up with an adb-like
program, and port gdb once it's working.

                                        Andy
Received on Fri Nov 26 08:31:25 1993