vbt
Staff member
KallistiOS 2.0.0
Copyright (C) 2002, 2003 Dan Potter
Copyright (C) 2012, 2013 Lawrence Sebald
RELEASE NOTES for 2.0.0
-----------------------
This release has been a long time coming, to say the least. Pretty much every
part of KOS has been modified in some way since 1.2.0 and many things have
undergone a complete overhaul. After almost a decade of living exclusively in
the source repository things have finally settled to a point where a release is
possible and a good idea.
All of the various platform targets for KOS other than the Dreamcast target are
considered deprecated unless someone else steps up to maintain them. If nobody
steps up, these will be removed at a later date. I somewhat doubt that any of
the other platforms can be built successfully anymore at this point.
Several libc standards compliance things were fixed, so stdlib.h no longer
includes assert.h for you. This will break some code that assumes that
assert() is available when stdlib.h (or kos.h) is included.
Speaking of libc-related standards compliance stuff, the built-in libc has been
removed entirely in favor of using Newlib directly. You must build a patched
Newlib for use with KOS. The patches needed for various versions of Newlib are
included in the utils directory of the KOS source.
The build system (including environ.sh) has seen some overhauling. You'll
need to build a new environ.sh from a sample again. Additionally, your
Makefile may need to change. See the examples.
The sound stream system has changed to accomidate multiple streams. Please see
kernel/arch/dreamcast/include/dc/sound/* for the new info. In particular, you
will need to call snd_stream_init from your program before using any of the
libraries like OggVorbis. Also if you are a stream user, you need to alloc
and free channels, and pass a handle along with it. See the OggVorbis libs
for an example.
The dbgio functions have changed. It now implements a full debug-friendly
console system. See include/kos/dbgio.h for more info.
There is a new build system for addons/ports which is quite a bit more
automated than the old way, and is arch-centric. Now to build a new addon
you downloaded, just extract it into addons/ and it will be built for
your arch if possible.
Subsequently, most everything that was in addons/ in previous versions of
KOS is now located in its own source control tree (and will be distributed
separately).
Several incorrectly placed pieces were moved from kernel/ into their own
addon (libkosutils). If you use the bspline or kos_img_* functions, you'll
need to add -lkosutils to your link line somewhere.
KOS now has a built-in network stack in the kernel/net directory. This is only
usable at the moment with the Broadband Adapter or the Lan Adapter for the
Dreamcast. It suports UDP and TCP over both IPv4 and IPv6. You also have an
almost complete set of sockets functions so that you can use the networking
support just like you would on any other OS. Add INIT_NET to your KOS_INIT_FLAGS
to initialize the network support on startup.
If you are using the networking support on the Dreamcast, it is now possible to
use dcload debugging through KOS' network stack. This is automatically set up
for you if you initialize the network at startup time (through the
KOS_INIT_FLAGS).
The old Maple API (that was deprecated in 1.1.8) has been removed entirely from
the source tree. Please update any code that may still be using it to the "new"
API that has been around since 1.1.8.
There are a few new Maple drivers included with this release that were not
around previously. There is now support for the PuruPuru pack, the Dreameye
camera, and the Sound Input Peripheral. See the appropriate header files for
more information about how to use each of these.
All of the KOS header files have had Doxygen comments added to them. From now
on, anything to be added to KOS should be documented before it is included in
the main tree.
A lot of cobwebs have built up over the years in the KOS source, and its quite
possible that there are parts of the code that do not work properly anymore.
Please, if you find anything that doesn't work properly anymore, report an issue
on the Sourceforge bug tracker!
Many changes were made to the synchronization primitives and other threading-
related things. Make sure to take a look at the documentation on them.
Support for the homebrew serial port SD card reader has been added. There is a
block-level driver for SD cards, as well as a lower-level driver for using the
serial port as a generic SPI bus.
If you would like a ready-to-use filesystem to go with your SD card support,
look no farther than libkosext2fs (in the addons tree). This provides support
for reading and writing to ext2 filesystems. This library is still pretty raw
and could use a lot more testing, but it seems to work fairly well as long as
you respect the few limitations in it (no files >= 4GiB in size being the big
one, absolute paths in symlinks don't work either). As a result of adding this
filesystem into the tree, there were a bunch of other changes made in the VFS
code. Specifically, fs_link() and fs_symlink() were added.
The GBA, ia32, and PS2 ports of KOS are all considered abandoned and are likely
to be removed in the future. If you would like to step up to maintain/improve
them, please let us know!
There's probably a whole bunch of other stuff that should be mentioned in here,
but its been so long since anyone has updated this document...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cadcdev/files/kallistios/2.0.0/
