HostFS with RISCOS 6.20

Hi all,

Apologies if this has come up before, but after a bit of a search I couldn’t find anything. I’m trying to run 6.20 from a hostfs directory under Linux and I’m getting “!!! ERROR !!! – unknown op in R9” errors. After a look in hostfs.c the values in R9 only go up to 7, and I’m getting an 8 (I suspect some kind of permissions issue somewhere, this being Linux). I’m using the latest code from Mercurial at http://www.home.marutan.net/hg/rpcemu. Am I using the correct version of hostfs? The MD5 checksums I have are :

62622a5c53b4749b221944a4951e3605 hostfs,ffa
08e981400b3058a23cfb1efebb6faa7b hostfsfiler,ffa

I got these from the Windows full installer download as I couldn’t find them in the barebones source distribution or anywhere else.

Thanks,
Dave.

On a Linux RPCEmu 0.9.4 build from here I get the same md5 checksums. OS6.20 starts up OK here. So not very helpful then!

I got these from the Windows full installer download

But I thought you were running on Linux?
HostFS might be the same on both Windows and Linux … but I would have expected them to be different.

Yes – I get the same checksums from the source code tarball too (slight confusion as I was looking in the Mercurial repository). As far as I can tell it should be calling the same code on both platforms in hostfs.c, which is why I’m baffled as to where it’s getting 8 from. Probably something permissions related or similar I guess.

Is the source from the hostfs module anywhere in CVS or Git? Probably a bit beyond my ken if it’s all ARM assembler or similar but might be worth a try. 6.20 does actually start up successfully once you get past the warnings and a lot of message boxes. I suspect it’s not completely healthy though.

@ Dave

Is the source from the hostfs module anywhere in CVS or Git?

RPCEmu team uses mercurial, while I have recently learned there is another team that uses github to maintain the macOS builds. Anyway, you’ll find the sources for HostFS and HostFSFiler for RPCEmu within the RPCEmu sources in a subdirectory called riscos-progs.

The hostfs(filer) sources are the same for both Windows, Linux and macOS because they are supposed to be executed on RISC OS and they should be using the same abstraction. So, if built with the same Assembler (which is armas an assembler distributed with GCC for RISC OS that supports Acorn ObjASM syntax) then yes they will produce the exact same modules.

For the error message you get, which RPCEmu configuration are you running (CPU etc…)? Did you get the compiled files from one of the easy-bundles? If so, which one? The RISC OS 5 or the RISC OS 3.70 easy bundle?

Have you tried to softload RO 6.20 from the HD Image?

I suspect some kind of permissions issue somewhere, this being Linux

Most likely so, I would make sure that the user used to run RPCEmu has full access to the HostFS directory, just to be sure.

[edit]
Just for ref this is where the RO 5 HostFS lives in the ROOL gitlab:
https://gitlab.riscosopen.org/RiscOS/Sources/Programmer/HostFS
[/edit]