From: gerald clark <gerald_clark_at_mindspring.com>
Date: Sun, 03 Nov 2002 13:08:56 -0600

Why don't you poor fellows just get a GameBoy?
I never could figure out why my Nokia Cell Phone
has a SNAKE game.

Do you Scandinavians feel compelled to put a game
in everything? ;>)

Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> 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.
>

-- 
Gerald L. Clark
Aero TerraTrike #1
http://www.wizwheelz.com/images/clarkaerotrike1.jpg
Member: Sky Soaring
Illinois, U.S.A.

Received on 2002-11-03