Cells and ratty rodents

Got off me arse and posted a new intro to Cell tutorial. It gets into SIMD coding so it's one of the more interesting ones.

And I managed to get a ps2 mouse driver working, of sorts (well, i'm getting the bytes from the port). And what a pile of shit the PS2 AUX port is. There doesn't seem to be any official documentation, just a few old text files from the days before the internets. Anyway, after a lot of mucking about I got it to work on bochs, qemu and and old PC I have - so that's good enough for me and it didn't take too much code. I'm still not sure if I should combine the keyboard and mouse 'devices' since they share the same io port.

Of course, in the process of testing on real hardware I found everything was broken. Everything. Ho hum. After much frobnication I found the APIC maybe wasn't as easy to use as I thought - or it's just buggy. And my old laptop doesn't even have one (early celeron). So I had to remove all the APIC code so it booted (i'm not doing any run-time stuff yet). And then I moved to using the RTC for timing instead. But that didn't work on real hardware either. Arg. In the end I got it to work but i'm not sure if it was just setting values directly (rather than read-twiddle-write) or clearing the interrupts first.

The apic thing is a bit of a bummer, I guess I'll need to use the pic instead for timing. Which sucks because it can only measure very short periods of time. I suppose if I use the RTC for longer periods - either by just using the 64Hz signal to count down, or the alarm function, and just resort to the pic for the last bit if more accuracy is required, it should be an ok balance between accuracy, overhead, and simplicity.

Hmm, wonder what to do next. A framebuffer would be nice - i'd really rather piss off the text mode entirely. And a disk driver - although then i'd need a filesystem too. Maybe it'd be less effort working out the hypervisor on the ps3 ... Hmm, perhaps a forth based monitor? Something to think about ...