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Subject: Brothers in ARMs

Brothers in ARMs

From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 17:20:17 +0100 (MET)

Björn and I had some time to talk during the weekend when we saw the sun and
felt the warmth of southern Spain on a company trip.

Some things we think might bring happiness:

Loadable Module Support (in a limited sense)
=======================
  We were thinking that we rip out all parts of Rockbox that can be seen as
  separate applications. Games, demos, text viewer, etc. All applications
  will be linked to separate binary chunks. (.rock files)

  We then reserve ~25K (or something) of memory and allow applications to get
  loaded at that fixed address and run.

  The .rock files are *strictly* only for the exact same version of the main
  firmware. We were planning on ensuring this by having the Makefile read the
  date as seconds and use that for a simple 32bit version number check when
  we load .rock files.

  The .rock files are linked for the static, fixed address where those 25K
  are saved for us.

  This allow all applications full access to all APIs without hassle. It does
  force an upgrade to a given Rockbox version to include the set of .rock
  files that follow it. There's no way to dynamicly build .rock files and add
  them without rebuilding the full firmware.

Common Application Buffer Area
==============================
  Since most applications need and use a buffer area for various operations,
  we can make all M applications use one single bigger one instead. Today, we
  have each application use their own N kilobytes, that then occupies N * M
  kilobytes.

-- 
Daniel "Bagder" Stenberg -- http://rockbox.haxx.se/
Received on 2002-10-28

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