DDE, new tool ideas
Andrew McCarthy (3688) 605 posts |
Developers here, having their ways of working, ranging from developing on Linux or attaching another computer to RISC OS for debugging. I wonder if there’s another way? Perhaps, a new DDE tool where you can drag and drop RISC OS applications or binaries to, with an icon on the icon-bar icon to run the application sandboxed from RISC OS. RISC OS has various RPCemu programs; could any of those programs be utilised to do this? |
Stuart Swales (8827) 1357 posts |
Perhaps because most applications DO need to interact with RISC OS? Like have files dragged to them? |
Rick Murray (539) 13850 posts |
The Debugger? ;) It might be interesting to set up a minimal version of RISC OS on another core, that pushes it’s requests to the host for integration with the primary OS (so it appears to be a normal app). Then, it can be frozen and examined, and if it crashes just reset that core and not the entire machine. Better yet, if it crashes, access the core’s memory to try to work out why. But, same question as always, who’s going to do these things? |
Paolo Fabio Zaino (28) 1882 posts |
@ Andrew,
If the App messes RISC OS instance, just shut it down and retry. You main instance won’t be affected.
In this case I am actually experimenting on it and working on this. Again, if it will work, there isn’t much other changes to do on a first release. It will be (obviously) Open Source, so whoever is interested will be able to join and help making it better etc… The Hypervisor should also:
Similar idea to what Michael has achieved by running BSD with RISC OS on the same board, but in my case they can share storage and can communicate with each-other via Virtual NIC drivers (which are just shared memory on the Hypervisor itself). Also RISC OS will access a frame-buffer that is mapped to an accelerated video driver. This is achieved by re-implementing Linux drivers API in the hHypervisor, that allows me to port Linux drivers to the Hypervisor with minimal changes (Rick I have been listening to you asking if there was a way to use Linux Drivers with RISC OS, this is as close as I can get to that idea). Given that Linux API is GPL and so are its driver, this means the Hypervisor will be GPL too, BUT that won’t influence RISC OS as it will run as a separate binary. If, in the future, we’ll start to move logic out of RISC OS into the hypervisor, the hypervisor will talk with the RISC OS stub as a “client/server” architecture, so, also in this case, GPL will not cause issues to RISC OS. If I manage to work the architecture right, RISC OS should also be able to access other VMs frame buffers and that, in the end, should help to run other OSes in a window similarly has we did on the RiscPC with M$ Windows running on the x86 card. |
Andrew McCarthy (3688) 605 posts |
There are several things a virtual or containerised approach might encompass:
Benefits of such an approach:
There are plenty of people around here with the skills, but not necessarily the inclination or time; perhaps opening a bounty might stir some interest. |