Ahh how time flies ...

Well its been a long 3 years since my last post, with a few absences due to hardware issues amongst other things. I'm still not in a position to work on the things I would like, but due to a few people pestering me when I had decided to stop working on AROS, i've actually still been working away behind the scene (mostly to address issues wawa was encountering, such as missing atomic support to compile certain c++ code on m68k and arm).

One of the main things I have been spending a lot of effort on during this time is reworking the AROS build system so that components get exactly the flags they should for a given toolchain set (e.g. host, kernel and target), because in the past it has been very hit and miss on which ones the components end up using resulting in subtle differences in how the code is compiled in different environments.

After a good 3 or 4 years of hacking away at this I now feel like there is starting to be a light at the end of the tunnel, and feel confident that the components are now using the flags they should be (bar some minor fixes still needed in some specific components mmakefile's).

Another part of this was splitting up the flags passed to the compilers/assemblers so that they are in the correct variables rather than being all crammed into the CFLAGS, making it difficult to work with. Going forward it should be easier to manipulate the used flags so that e.g only the ISA components get replaced to compile for a different flavor of processor on a given platform, and this is currently used to make sure we get all the correct flags needed for m68k builds targeting 68000/020 etc cpus or x86 32bit and 64bit code generation.

Correcting this has allowed the darwin builds to be re-enabled (although due to their lack of maintenance, they probably still need fixes in the code base to get working..)

In combination with these fixes and changes (there is also better c++ handling in the templates, amongst other things),  I've also updated the AROS toolchains through to the current experimental version 9.1.0 - which is being used to build the pc-x86_64-smp target. So far the toolchain has been successfully tested with all the AROS targets, bar PPC - although the ARM support is needing a bit of adjustment, which i'm currently talking with michal to get done.

Well, if you thought that might be enough to keep me busy - ive also been working on other things!

The m68k target has received some love to try and improve its performance and behavior a little, and address some problems using it on vampire - though this work is still ongoing. The uae generic gfx card code has been reworked into p96gfx.hidd and handles other devices better now, has fixes to the sprite imagery handling, and should work with multiple p96 .card driver instances at the same time. There is also preliminary code in place to detect remapped rom images so that AROS does not try to use the physical memory they occupy (e.g when booting an a3000 using superkickstart).

ATA device has had its api adjusted slightly so that it uses generic definitions for the controller/bus/unit interfaces inherited from the storage subsystem classes.  AHCI devices has also been adapted to expose the same api''s and classes so they now operate using the common storage subsystem, allowing them to be enumerated easily in sysexplorer etc.

Finally, this summary wouldn't be complete without mentioning that I have updated our MesaGL subsystem from the quite old v7 we have been using since its initial inception, to the current v19! Unfortunately (and after discussion with other devs) it meant that for the time being the nouveau driver had to be disabled since it needs considerable work to be able to compile with the newer gallium code base, but if someone decides to do the work before Michal or myself can get round to it - we will finally be able to use modern 3d graphics technologies in AROS!. Im really quite excited about this, and cant wait to see the first OpenGL 4.5 code running native on AROS - and maybe even Vulkan down the line...