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[Torsion-announce] Torsion 0.0.18 released
From: |
Dan Helfman |
Subject: |
[Torsion-announce] Torsion 0.0.18 released |
Date: |
Mon, 06 Dec 2004 20:33:01 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (X11/20040926) |
Here's the changelog:
torsion 0.0.18 (Mon, 06 Dec 2004 09:15:04 -0800)
* switched to a new faster checkpointer
* wrote a keyboard driver
* added a very basic command shell
* implemented a unit test framework
Firstly, thanks are due to Travis Geiselbrecht for general help, Lee
Salzman for debugging wizardy, and Geoffrey Plitt for work on the shell
and some good discussions.
The biggest change in this release is also the change that is probably
least visible to any potential user: a fairly large overhaul of the
memory checkpointer. Specifically, the mechanism by which dirty pages
are gathered used to involve taking out a global lock and then spidering
through the page tables on every checkpoint. Lee pointed out that a much
better approach would be to make all persistent virtual pages start out
as copy-on-write, and then trap any page write faults to determine which
pages are dirtied between each checkpoint. I finally got around to
implementing this method for the 0.0.18 release, and, after more than a
bit of debugging, it turned out to work quite well.
The keyboard driver and basic shell allow the user to enter very simple
commands to get the status of various Torsion sub-systems. I currently
use the shell as more of a debugging and diagnostic tool than anything,
a temporary solution to be eventually replaced with a real shell,
perhaps some sort of real programming language.
The unit test framework is also very simple, but could be used to write
some very real unit and functional tests, which Torsion needs especially
at this point in its development.
Anyway, those are the highlights. In the effort to update the
checkpointer, many other sub-systems were modified and improved, but
apparently nothing noteworthy enough to make the release notes.
As for the future? Well, in the near term, Torsion could do with truly
persistent tasks, which have been on the to-do list for a while now.
Persistent tasks would allow you to fire up some application (say, a
game or text editor), and then reboot, only to continue exactly where
you left off in that particular task.
Additionally, William Rubel has generously offered some of his expertise
in working on Torsion's documentation, which I've really got to take him
up on now that 0.0.18 is out the door.
And as always, I encourage anyone with questions, ideas, or comments to
post on the torsion-dev mailing list.
--
Dan Helfman <address@hidden>
http://torsion.org/
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