From: sophana <jobarjo78_at_yahoo.fr>
Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 18:37:20 +0200

Björn Stenberg wrote:

>sophana wrote:
>
>
>>I had a look at the plugin mechanism. The big struct containing all the
>>pointers is touchy to make backward compatibility.
>>
>>
>
>That's not a big problem with Free Software, since the plugins are always recompiled when the API changes.
>
>
>
So why the API struct ? You could link the plugins so they make direct
calls to the rockbox routines. This should be not very hard.

>Backwards plugin API compatibility is only important if you worry about old binary-only plugins working with new Rockbox versions. That is not a problem we have.
>
>
>
I thought that was the goal.
But I agree that, having the source of all the plugins, compiling them
everytime is not a very big deal.
So you should definitly take out the plugin api and link them directly.
So the plugins can call any rockbox routine directly.
I'm sure this is a minor gcc linker tweak.
one more question: are sh1 executables relocatable? this way, several
plugins could be loaded together...

>>Is there not another way of making system calls through a trap or
>>something like that? (like most modern OS)
>>
>>
>
>Trapping is used for separating user-space and kernel-space code. We don't have anything like that, we just want to call a few functions. So we use simple callbacks.
>
>
>

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Received on 2004-06-01