2015/05/24

DISCLAIMER: These notes are from the defunct k8 project which precedes SquirrelJME. The notes for SquirrelJME start on 2016/02/26! The k8 project was effectively a Java SE 8 operating system and as such all of the notes are in the context of that scope. That project is no longer my goal as SquirrelJME is the spiritual successor to it.

16:24

Thinking about it, the way my kernel is built currently is a mess. I have "build-kernel" which is essentially this gigantic method. One thing that is a problem is that I will need to build "distributions" such as installer ISOs or ROMs for specific systems. Some parts need the native compiler, other parts do not. There would also have to be a way to share those bits to reduce duplicate code and junk all in one place.

17:07

I will need to figure out a name for such a system though. However there are more things to do in real life that must be completed also. The built distributions must all be live systems which can be installed onto a system, since that way they are easier to test and they are in essence their own installers. It would also be the intended way to install things also. The only major problem is also including source code. Currently in a ZIP my code is 5.4MiB, whereas a tgz is only 1.4MiB, and txz is 1,016KiB. I would suppose that keeping the source in a tgz would be best as it is the smallest. My hope would be that such a live system with complete native binaries for a specific system so that recompilation is not required initially, that is remains under 64MiB. ROMs for say the N64 will need to include a root filesystem on the ROM itself along with boot code, so for say a filesystem design compression will be required to maximize space since 64MiB is the limit. So then for the live setup I should perhaps have a menu. One that says "Live System" and "Installer" which respectively does as such. However, internationalization wise I will need some kind of localization JAR stuff which can create properties files which may be added on to base installations as needed without requiring it be in the class path or otherwise. Another thing for the N64 ROM is that the native compiled code could be executed directly from the ROM so it cannot be compressed.

18:58

I believe the best thing to do kernel wise as per communication with itself and userspace would be to have an RMI interface so that only interfaces are exposed and other services can be provided through it. Stuff such as process management, creating sub-vms, hardware virtual machines, joysticks, etc. will all be done through it. Then with such things using said interface it would be possible to then permit testing of the primary library and such in a interpretive only VM in a sense.

19:23

The current hairball system for the kernel is not going to work because due the modular nature and dependencies it is possible for some things to be excluded. So I will need something that is like "make menuconfig" for Linux which looks at all of the packages and determines which are plugins for what. There would also need to be a provides based system to, so that packages can give virtual names of what they have available. So in respect, vmjar is going to get somewhat crowded.

19:30

So for such a system, I would also need a type of section similar to Debian such as "required" or "optional". Perhaps it can be "select-mode".

19:36

Although I still lack an actual compilation for the past few months, as I keep changing my other code to be better. I will have to change hairball enough so that it is better. Must be done because not fixing the mess I have now would be very difficult to change in the future. I need to lighten up the package versions and stuff also. Right now I have a rather complex version scheme, so it should perhaps be simplified. Perhaps I will go for a basic dot only notation. There could be many sub-dots and letters would be higher than numbers but it would be simplified to a point where there is no very complex class or formula determination used.

19:44

HairballLauncher can also be simplified so that it no longer needs all these other packages to be boot built.

20:04

Hairball existed back to when I was programming for Java 5 which means it has not benefited much from the way Java 8 code is written. I also made some bad design choices in hairball which are hitting me now, the code is rather ugly and difficult to maintain.

23:00

This package management code is going to end up being much nicer than before and much much simpler to use too.

23:51

So far, much much better. In fact it was rather overdue this fixing up.