mosa Wiki & Documentation Rss Feed

Updated Wiki: refactor compiler instruction mechanisms to use a flyweight pattern and fixed size structures

__grover — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 23:38:15 GMT

The compiler currently creates an instance of an instruction derived object at various points in the pipeline. Mostly this happens during source analysis (IL decoding), transformations from IL to IR and IR to x86 and at various points in between. While this makes the code easily written, it also has some issues - mostly with performance and non-deterministic memory usage.

A high priority change in 0.2 is to split the instructions into two pieces: The data and the logic (platform specific) - in a lot of cases, this will not cause the allocation of additional objects during stage transformations. In some cases it will. But mostly this will reduce the currently large number of virtual method calls and memory consumption.

One core idea is to make the current instruction objects immutable singletons, e.g. they will not contain changeable data and will not be instantiated more than once.

But first the new InstructionData type:

public struct InstructionData
{
  // Reference to the instruction in this slot
  private readonly Instruction instruction;
  // The destination operand of the instruction (where the result is placed into)
  private readonly Operand destination;
  // The first parameter to the instruction
  private readonly Operation first;
  // The second parameter to the instruction
  private readonly Operand second;
  // The source line, IL offset or something else to be able to map debug information
  private readonly int sourceLine;

  // Methods and ctors left out for clarity.
}

When a method is compiled from IL, it is currently represented as a list of instructions. In the future this will build an InstructionCollection, which consists of a list of InstructionData structures. This structure holds a reference to the instruction in its place and provides parameter data for the instruction itself. The user will only work with the InstructionData structure. Using generics and a value type allows the entire list to be allocated at once including space for all operands.

Some IL instructions use more than 3 operands. In this case, the instruction data structure shall hold the first three operands and the instruction shall hold the remaining operands. In this (and only this) case the Instruction will be allocated too.

The InstructionData value type is immutable, which means an existing instance will never change. This is important for some code analysis passes. In order to modify an InstructionData, it will be overwritten with an entirely new InstructionData instance.

All changes to an instruction happen through an InstructionCollection, which also maintains bits, which indicate if the data flow graphs or control flow graphs need to be rebuilt.

Updated Wiki: Home

tgiphil — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 16:53:51 GMT

Managed Operating System Alliance (MOSA) Framework

The Managed Operating System Alliance (MOSA) Framework is a set of tools, specifications and source code to foster development of managed operating systems based on the Common Intermediate Language. The Framework is divided into:

More questions are answered in our FAQ.

License

The projects created by the Managed Operating System Alliance are open source and released under the terms of the New BSD License. Read more about our License policy.

Contact & Community

Our project status can be seen at Ohloh and CIA. Also, stay up to date by subscribing to our developer blogs! You can read the current newsletter or previous newsletters in the Newsletter Archive.

IRC

The MOSA project also has an IRC channel #mosa on Freenode’s IRC network (irc.freenode.net).

Contributing

The MOSA project needs contributions in all areas. Contributions can be comments on various specifications we'll publish, the default implementations we provide, supporting other projects, which use MOSA components as well as help on the wikis. Please read our Contributer Information page for additional information.

Updated Wiki: Home

tgiphil — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:24:37 GMT

Managed Operating System Alliance (MOSA) Framework

Updated Wiki: Create Boot Image Tool

tgiphil — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:53:52 GMT

Create Boot Image Tool

The "CreateBootImage" tool is used to create bootable disk images containing the MOSA kernel.

The tool accepts two command line options:

CreateBootImage.exe <configuration file> <destination image file>

Below is sample configuration file:

The configuration file is a list of options, one per line, with arguments seperated by a tab. The following options are supported:

option	Arguments	Description
-volume	Volume Name	Set the volume name for the first partition
-blocks	# of Blocks	Set the number of 512-byte blocks
-fat12		Use FAT12 file system
-fat16		Use FAT16 file system
-fat32		Use FAT32 file system (untested)
-vhd		Create image in VHD (Virtual PC/Virtual Server) format
-vdi		Create image in VDI (VirtualBox) format
-img		Create image in IMG format
-syslinux		Patch disk image for syslinux
-mbr	Filename	Use file for Master Boot Record
-boot	Filename	Use file for Boot Record
-file	Filename, Destination	Include file in file system

The tool can create disk images for the following emulators:

Emulator	File Format
Virtual PC 2004/2007	.VHD
Virtual Server	.VHD
VMware	.VHD
VirtualBox	.VDI
QEMU	.IMG
Raw Image	.IMG

Updated Wiki: Create Boot Image Tool

tgiphil — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:53:30 GMT

Create Boot Image Tool

The "CreateBootImage" tool is used to create bootable disk images containing the MOSA kernel.

The tool accepts two command line options:

CreateBootImage.exe <configuration file> <destination image file>

Below is sample configuration file:

Cannot resolve image macro, invalid image name or id.

The configuration file is a list of options, one per line, with arguments seperated by a tab. The following options are supported:

option	Arguments	Description
-volume	Volume Name	Set the volume name for the first partition
-blocks	# of Blocks	Set the number of 512-byte blocks
-fat12		Use FAT12 file system
-fat16		Use FAT16 file system
-fat32		Use FAT32 file system (untested)
-vhd		Create image in VHD (Virtual PC/Virtual Server) format
-vdi		Create image in VDI (VirtualBox) format
-img		Create image in IMG format
-syslinux		Patch disk image for syslinux
-mbr	Filename	Use file for Master Boot Record
-boot	Filename	Use file for Boot Record
-file	Filename, Destination	Include file in file system

The tool can create disk images for the following emulators:

Emulator	File Format
Virtual PC 2004/2007	.VHD
Virtual Server	.VHD
VMware	.VHD
VirtualBox	.VDI
QEMU	.IMG
Raw Image	.IMG

Updated Wiki: Create Boot Image Tool

tgiphil — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:49:22 GMT

Create Boot Image Tool

The "CreateBootImage" tool is used to create bootable disk images containing the MOSA kernel.

The tool accepts two command line options:

CreateBootImage.exe <configuration file> <destination image file>

Below is sample configuration file:

Cannot resolve image macro, invalid image name or id.

The configuration file is a list of options, one per line, with arguments seperated by a tab. The following options are supported:

option	Arguments	Description
-volume	Volume Name	Set the volume name for the first partition
-blocks	# of Blocks	Set the number of 512-byte blocks
-fat12		Use FAT12 file system
-fat16		Use FAT16 file system
-fat32		Use FAT32 file system (untested)
-vhd		Create image in VHD (Virtual PC/Virtual Server) format
-vdi		Create image in VDI (VirtualBox) format
-img		Create image in IMG format
-syslinux		Patch disk image for syslinux
-mbr	Filename	Use file for Master Boot Record
-boot	Filename	Use file for Boot Record
-file	Filename, Destination	Include file in file system

The tool can create disk images for the following emulators:

Emulator	File Format
Virtual PC 2004/2007	.VHD
Virtual Server	.VHD
VMware	.VHD
VirtualBox	.VDI
QEMU	.IMG
Raw Image	.IMG

Updated Wiki: Create Boot Image Tool

tgiphil — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:48:51 GMT

Create Boot Image Tool

The "CreateBootImage" tool is used to create bootable disk images containing the MOSA kernel.

The tool accepts two command line options:

CreateBootImage.exe <configuration file> <destination image file>

Below is sample configuration file:

Cannot resolve image macro, invalid image name or id.

The configuration file is a list of options, one per line, with arguments seperated by a tab. The following options are supported:

option	Arguments	Description
-volume	Volume Name	Set the volume name for the first partition
-blocks	# of Blocks	Set the number of 512-byte blocks
-fat12		Use FAT12 file system
-fat16		Use FAT16 file system
-fat32		Use FAT32 file system (untested)
-vhd		Create image in VHD (Virtual PC/Virtual Server) format
-vdi		Create image in VDI (VirtualBox) format
-img		Create image in IMG format
-syslinux		Patch disk image for syslinux
-mbr	Filename	Use file for Master Boot Record
-boot	Filename	Use file for Boot Record
-file	Filename, Destination	Include file in file system

The tool can create disk images for the following emulators:

Emulator	File Format
Virtual PC 2004/2007	.VHD
Virtual Server	.VHD
VMware	.VHD
VirtualBox	.VDI
QEMU	.IMG
Raw Image	.IMG

Updated Wiki: MOSA Tools

tgiphil — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:48:32 GMT

MOSA Tools

The MOSA project is developing a set of tools along with its core operating system components. This page provides quick links to descriptions of all MOSA tools.

Updated Wiki: Make Boot Image Tool

tgiphil — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:47:41 GMT

Create Boot Image Tool

option	Arguments	Description
-volume	Volume Name	Set the volume name for the first partition
-blocks	# of Blocks	Set the number of 512-byte blocks
-fat12		Use FAT12 file system
-fat16		Use FAT16 file system
-fat32		Use FAT32 file system (untested)
-vhd		Create image in VHD (Virtual PC/Virtual Server) format
-vdi		Create image in VDI (VirtualBox) format
-img		Create image in IMG format
-syslinux		Patch disk image for syslinux
-mbr	Filename	Use file for Master Boot Record
-boot	Filename	Use file for Boot Record
-file	Filename, Destination	Include file in file system

The tool can create disk images for the following emulators:

Emulator	File Format
Virtual PC 2004/2007	.VHD
Virtual Server	.VHD
VMware	.VHD
VirtualBox	.VDI
QEMU	.IMG
Raw Image	.IMG

Updated Wiki: developer blogs

illuminus86 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:29:07 GMT

MOSA Development Blog Entries

MOSA Dev Blogs News Feed

illuminus: Microsoft Open-Sources their Common Compiler Infrastructure Metadata Tools

Friday, April 17, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

…which here at MOSA is good news. Included in this toolset is a full API, mostly managed, for reading/writing CIL
PE files, along with reading/writing Managed PDB files.

The news comes from ZDNet, but you can see it for yourself at CodePlex.

At MOSA we are still trying to analyze the feature set. The PDB reading functionality is fully managed and supposedly applies to multiple PDB format variants. The PDB writing functionality calls out to unmanaged code and is most likely not useful.

However, the BSD-compatible MS-PL this is licensed under means we can cannibalize the reading functionality and use it to learn the format well enough to be able to write PDB-writing functionality as well, for both the managed and unmanaged PDB variants.

illuminus: A post-a for MOSA

Thursday, April 16, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

This post is really meant to be a test. I'm trying to get Yahoo Pipes working for me to aggregate the blogs of the MOSA developers.

We shall see...

Kintaro: Logo suggestions

Monday, March 30, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

So finally we have the logo's structure finished. Only thing left is to decide on a good colorscheme.

I made some designs, take a look for yourself.

Kintaro: Slowly beating mono

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

As I've mentioned in this post earlier, we encountered some problems when trying to run mosa compiled by mono.

As of today, mosacl is capable of compiling without crashing, but the created binary won't boot. So now I have to go back and digg deep down into asm code again.

Happy hacking is the new lifestyle :)

Kintaro: Pictor progress

Friday, March 13, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

Sorry for the long downtime and no postings, I encountered some problems with the server. After several updates and bufixes it's up and running again.

To make up for the long downtime I bring you some good news!

I worked on Pictor the last couple of days and added Pictor.UI, as a first rudimentary User Interface.

To see it in action, just take a look at the video below.

Kintaro: Cutting it down

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

We're making progresss in making version 0.1 stable. We had 775 failed testcases 2 days ago and were able to clean them out down to 283 failed testcases.

We're quite busy cleaning the code, removing bugs and doing some refactoring. This is a good sign (at least I hope so).

0.1 Release shouldn't be that far away anymore.

Kintaro: Strange mono behaviour

Saturday, February 21, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

While trying to get MOSA running on mono, I've encountered some strange behaviour.

When running mosacl.exe on Mosa.HelloWorld.exe compiled by Windows .NET everything is fine. When, instead, running mosacl.exe on Mosa.HelloWorld.exe compiled by mono, the compiler crashes trying to parse obscure instructions (like

mov const, const

, which makes no sense at all).

I took a look at the IL code produced by both, Microsoft .NET and mono, and they differ in various ways.

MS .NET	mono
IL_0000: nop

Kintaro: W3C Compliant

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

After some bugfixing this site is finally W3C XHTML 1.0 compliant. Check for yourself here.

Kintaro: Documentation online

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 | From MOSA Dev Blogs

Ok, so the script is working, the cronjob is running and the documentation is now online at http://mosadoc.think-in-co.de

Kintaro: Automated documentation