A list of files in a makefile goes stale the moment somebody adds a program and forgets to
name it, and what they forgot is invisible until they go looking for it on the machine. So
SplitDisk gained a mirror command and the disk rule is one line: putting a file where the
others live is now the whole of putting it on the disk.
EVERY FILE GOES THROUGH put AND EVERY DIRECTORY THROUGH mkdir. That is the point of it -
mirror adds a walk and no filesystem code at all, so anything the format refuses here it
refuses everywhere, in the same words. What is new is the walk, and the walk is what the
six checks in Tests/disk.sh are about: that it goes all the way down, that it leaves dotfiles
and named directories behind, and that a name too long stops it.
REFUSED RATHER THAN SKIPPED, because a disk quietly missing a file is the exact failure a
mirror exists to prevent. Which meant four sources had to be renamed - a directory entry
holds 22 characters and they were 23, 23, 24 and 29:
16bitSegmentedSieve.asm -> 16bitSieve.asm
16bitSegmentedSieveModern.asm -> 16bitSieveModern.asm
consoleInterruptTest.asm -> consoleInterrupt.asm
controllerWriteTest.asm -> controllerWrite.asm
The test names in the manifest are unchanged, since those are identifiers and every recorded
result is filed under them. Only where the source lives has moved.
The entries are sorted before anything is written. readdir hands them back in whatever order
the host filesystem feels like, and a disk image that comes out different from one run to the
next is an image no test could compare against another.
The disk grew from one megabyte to four and from 192 directory entries to 1,024. The sources
are 2,850 blocks and the mirror filled the old directory on its first run, which is a thing
that should not need thinking about again.
The Tests fixture disk is deliberately NOT mirrored. It is a controlled fixture with known
contents, and the shipped disk is the one meant to be useful; they want different things.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
SWI osExit takes a status in A, and the shell keeps it. Fifty eight exits
across twenty three programs now say deliberately whether they worked: 25
did what they were asked, 24 did not, 9 were asked wrongly. Compare is the
exception and says so - one there means the files differ, which is a result
rather than a failure, the way diff has always had it.
IN A RATHER THAN Q, which is not a departure from the rule that a service
answers in Q. This one takes an ARGUMENT, the way osPrintNumber takes A and
B, and it never returns to answer anything. A is free precisely because a
return would have put it back - and Q is the ALU's output, so a small
number costs four instructions there against one in A.
The shell does not print it. A program that failed has already said so in
words and a number beside that is noise, so osLastStatus hands it back and
Status is the program that shows it. That indirection is the point: the
number exists for the thing that cannot read words.
MARKING THE EXITS FOUND A DEFECT ON THE FIRST RUN. Type and More printed
why they had failed and then fell through into the success exit, reporting
that all was well. Nobody had noticed, because while the only reader was a
person, the person could see both the complaint and the claim.
Two smaller things. Snake sets the console to line mode and then exits with
zero, and the linter flagged the second RSTA as redundant - an exit status
and a console mode, equal by accident, which is the class that must never
be collapsed. And the README still taught answering by writing into the
frame, three months of habit that SRET replaced yesterday; that section is
gone and the one describing SRET stands in its place.
The memory map gave CosmOS 0x0000 through 0x1FFF of Program Memory and
applications 0x2000 and above. CosmOS is 8141 bytes at the previous commit,
which is fifty one bytes short of the line, and the next thing added to it
went over.
GOING OVER DOES NOT FAIL WHERE IT HAPPENS. Nothing enforces the division: an
application says where it goes with #Base and the loader puts it there, so a
CosmOS that has grown past 0x1FFF simply has the next program loaded written
over the end of it. What breaks is whichever part of the shell that program
happened to cover, at whatever later moment somebody uses it. It turned up here
as the monitor's assemble command answering "I do not know" to valid
instructions, several commands into a session, on a machine that had booted
perfectly well.
Both halves are doubled: applications now start at 0x4000 in Program Memory and
0x2000 in Data Memory. That is 16K of code and 8K of data for the system,
against the 8775 and 2948 it uses today. Both were on the same trajectory, and
moving them together means the twenty files that say #Base are edited once
rather than twice.
The standalone loader's loadable.asm keeps its old base: it belongs to the
loader CosmOS grew out of, not to CosmOS, and its addresses answer to a
different program. The unbased-segment diagnostic keeps its old base too - it
exists to produce an error message that names the address, and the message is
what is recorded.
Tests/docs.sh now reads the two limits out of the table in the README and
measures both segments against them. It reads them rather than being told them
because the table is the specification, and this is the second time in this
project that the thing nobody checked is the thing that rotted.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5