October 22, 2010

Checking in..

I wanted to check in on this blog, to ensure that I carried on with my intent of logging my activity as I progress on the development of NickOS, however, the last few weeks have been somewhat hectic. We were recently blessed by the birth of our first child, and whilst that has opened up my life in many ways, it's also taken a negative toll on other activities (like developments and personal projects). It's amazing how working to someone else's schedule destroys that quality, dedicated time that you were once used to getting.

Anyway, all that said, NickOS is stil alive and I'm beginning to find a schedule and some window's of opportunity to work on it, so I'll be back working on this site too.

To let you know my current issues, I'm currently stuck on some loader code that needs to relocate a loaded binary that's been read in from disk. The relocation process essentially needs to rewrite the code that's been read in from disk, so that any jumps to absolute memory locations are resolved to be correct for the particular location in memory where the binary has been loaded. Since the location is not known ahead of the loading process, this needs to be fully dynamic. I'm just not quite getting it to work...!

Which is all good fun, although somewhat frustrating, but it is driving me to develop better debugging tools, that can ultimately become part of NickOS, so the effort isn't wasted.

Until next time!