Wednesday, October 17, 2007

What I'm working on at the moment

Image library
I've optimised the image library in several important cases (all the optimisations are within a single routine, DefaultRenderTo, where information hiding is allowed to go out the window to improve speed of rendering images).
I've added support for more frame buffer pixel formats, although they have yet to be tested.
Specifically, I've taken some code from MPlayer to do copying to the frame buffer (mem2agpcpy), this will be an optimisation for almost all applications, but mplayer was the only one really suffering.
I will also add a generic image colour inverter that can be used by the filer for selected files, instead of the ugly red square overlay.

Live CD
The stax scripts weren't quite what I was after, but they have helped me to understand squashfs and build it into my kernel and scripts; unionfs (or aufs) will come later. At the moment, the kernel doesn't boot under QEMU for some reason that I will be looking into.

MPlayer
The ROLF Mplayer output library can play DVDs at full speed (and about 50% processor loading). The only example HD trailer I have (The Bourne Supremacy) plays pretty well, too.
I'm not sure about licensing issues to do with including it on the Live CD, though.

Launcher
This is a new program that will allow simple applications to be built which have an icon bar icon and run programs on any files dropped on the icon (this will initially be used for mplayer). It could be extended to something scriptable, perhaps.

Compatibility Library
This library has been added recently, with partial support for a few simple RO SWIs. It is easy to integrate with Brandy, although there is an issue with running a Wimp program; Brandy doesn't seem to like being turned into a daemon (which ROLF_Initialise usually does). I haven't tried integrating it with (ARM) QEMU yet, but it shouldn't be much harder.
I think it should be possible to support ARM code relocatable modules fairly easily, by having a shared memory block containing the RMA. It would be nice to get something like the ArtWorks viewer running.


Priorities
I'll be working on getting the live cd to run under QEMU and, in the mean time making minor additions to the image library and filer.

Back to Blogger

I think this might be a quicker way to publish my thoughts about what's being updated in ROLF.