VSTa

VMWare

Installing VSTa in VMWare's not that hard. Here are some instructions.

Patches

Here are some patches I have made to my system.

adb.patch - Add a command for viewing the thread id.
cons.patch - Set the beep tone when beeping, so it doesnt make irritating noises in VMWare.
isr.patch - Add a second ISR system call that allows a probe function to be downloaded into the kernel. Used by the lance driver.
stat.patch - Stat command opens files for reading. I'm not sure what SHOULD be done here. I think at some point the permissions used for rstat and wstat need to be revisited and all the servers and clients in the system checked for consistency.
vas.patch - When performing a fork() from a thread thats not the main thread, copy the thread's stack while forking.
vmware-vm.patch - Small patch to a header file so that the VSTa kernel doesnt crash VMWare.
unlink.patch - patch for unlink() in libc. The implementation didnt handle relative paths properly. Note -- this patch is probably incomplete, and path handling in the entire open.c should probably be reviewed carefully sometime soon.
make.patch - patch for src/bin/ports/make/make.c to fix a buffer overflow that causes make to crash.

VSTa Programs

This page has my VSTa programs. Its not really a VSTa page, just a place to put up files for people to grab. See vsta.org for more info.

pci-lance driver

lance is an ethernet driver for the VSTa operating system for pci-lance (amd79c970) cards such as the one in VMWare. So far this driver is tested only in VMWare. It requires the minifs library.

Minifs

Here's minifs, a small library to make writing servers easier. The tarball includes an example and some prose. This is a work in progress and is subject to change and the documents aren't complete yet.

lwIP for VSTa

This is an incomplete port of the lwIP TCP/IP stack to VSTa. I am not currently working on VSTa and I may not complete this port.

The port is complete enough to access the TCP functionality to run simple client and server programs. There are many known issues in this version: There appear to be some resource leaks, there are unhandled errors during some of the shutdown scenerios and there is still a bit of debugging and documentation left to be done. (Additionally the minifs package needs to be updated, documented and relreleased, and lance updated to use the new library).

To build lwIP first grab minifs here (This is a modified version of minifs, as the minifs package has not been completely updated and released yet). Unpack and build minifs. Next grab lwIP-0.7.2 sources and unpack them. Grab the vsta sources here and unpack them into the lwip-0.7.2/contrib/ports. In lwip-0.7.2/contrib/ports/vsta edit main.c to set the IP address and run make to build lwip.

The API is similar to plan9's and allows easy access to sockets through a filesystem interface. For example, look at sock.sh, which appropriately enough was used to transfer itself to my linux box.

The telnetd code from the ka9q server works with slight modification. The code is in the test subdir of the lwip sources. Link with -lusr. The TTY handling code has been augmented to allow vi to run properly. The emulation is only partial though. Some features such as intr are not yet supported. The proper fix for this would be a seperate tty library.

That's all for now.. bye.