Hello world

Well I integrated a timer interrupt into WoofƆs and got that to work eventually - the MMU makes things like this very fun as I have to map everything I need to use. A few silly bugs in the MMU code didn't help either.

After a 7 hour stint last night I finally booted up an executed a 'user process', including sending it the initial welcome message. It doesn't do much other than call a debug printf function to say hello, but given that it is running in it's own address space successfully that seems a reasonable achievement.

Interrupts are going to be a bit of a pain. Because I want user code to deal with interrupts the kernel has to clear the hardware interrupt status bits itself - which means it needs to know about all the devices that might produce interrupts and how to turn them off. I can't see any way around this right now. I also need some way of letting the user-code know what triggered the interrupt, which is another issue - even with 96 interrupts there is some double-up on the interrupt source. I guess there's always the mailbox idea, or a syscall to query it. There might be some hardware where the interrupt needs processing immediately too, but i'll come to that when I find it.

Hmm, next thing might be to think about devices and get a serial device working.