Big summer update 2 – Smaller news

After the big announcement of last time, here are some “smaller” news about what has been ongoing while I was away from this blog…

Kernel code is now C++1x compliant

Kernel code is now compiled with the -std=c++0x flag of GCC. There used to be some odd compilation error which prevented it (storing ascii character 179 in a “char” failed, because it should have been “unsigned char” instead), but it’s now fixed.

The PIDs type is gone

There used to be a little “PIDs” class within the kernel API which allowed defining a list of PIDs and doing some operations on it. Well, this class proved to be too abstract for kernel use, so it is now gone, replaced by a much simpler, manually managed list inside of the code that needed it.

Memory management test suite is gone

This had to happen someday, I guess. As kernel code moves forward, the memory management still gets to be tweaked as needed, so bits of the test suites get to be rewritten all the time. Sadly, its code also happened to be an unmaintainable hackjob, as it took me some time to discover. So it’s now gone. The spec used to write it is still here and continues to evolve, but I don’t think it worth it to experience the pain of implementing it while the kernel is still in an unstable, breakage-happy state. Work on it, along with other kernel component testing software, will probably be resumed once the kernel goes final.