[Torsion-announce] Torsion 0.0.16 released

[Dan Helfman]

Here's the changelog:

torsion 0.0.16 (Sat, 17 May 2003 02:29:45 -0700)
  * virtual memory allocator is now itself persistent
  * new unit test for physical page allocator
  * actually boots on real hardware again

The virtual memory allocator being truly persistent is really cool. You
can malloc() some memory, reboot, and then that memory will remain
allocated, until of course you free it. This begins to make the
persistent storage system actually useful, because programs can allocate
memory for persistent data structures and expect them to hang around
across reboots.

The unit test for the physical page allocator is what really allowed me
to stomp some major bugs that were holding up a release. If you're
interested in the gory details and the hackish solution, read
enable_allocator() in physmem.cc. Don't say I didn't warn ya, though.
The unit test itself basically just allocates all the available physical
memory one page at a time, and then frees it all in the same order.
Simple, yet effective.

And the booting again on real hardware is always nice. Bochs is
sometimes just too lenient for its own good.

-- 
Dan Helfman <address@hidden>