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Status-update-August-2022.md (1847B)


  1. ---
  2. title: Status update, August 2022
  3. date: 2022-08-16
  4. ---
  5. It is a blessedly cool morning here in Amsterdam. I was busy moving house
  6. earlier this month, so this update is a bit quieter than most.
  7. For a fun off-beat project this month, I started working on a [GameBoy
  8. emulator](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hdmg) written in Hare. No promises on when
  9. it will be functional or how much I plan on working on it -- just doing it for
  10. fun. In more serious Hare news, I have implemented Thread-Local Storage (TLS)
  11. for qbe, our compiler backend. Hare's standard library does not support
  12. multi-threading, but I needed this for Helios, whose driver library does support
  13. threads. It will also presumably be of use for cproc once it lands upstream.
  14. Speaking of Helios, it received the runtime components for TLS support on
  15. x86\_64, namely the handling of %fs and its base register MSR in the context
  16. switch, and updates to the ELF loader for handling .tdata/.tbss sections.
  17. I have also implemented support for moving and copying capabilities, which will
  18. be useful for creating new processes in userspace. Significant progress towards
  19. capability destructors was also made, with some capabilities — pages and
  20. page tables in particular — being reclaimable now. Next goal is to finish
  21. up all of this capability work so that you can freely create, copy, move, and
  22. destroy capabilities, then use all of these features to implement a simple
  23. shell. There is also some refactoring due at some point soon, so we'll see about
  24. that.
  25. Other Hare progress has been slow this month, as I'm currently looking at a
  26. patch queue 123 emails backed up. When I'm able to sit down and get through
  27. these, we can expect a bunch of updates in short order.
  28. SourceHut news will be covered in the "what's cooking" post later today. That's
  29. all for now! Thanks for tuning in.