Hi folks, Developer News 22/01/97 ARM Architecture Reference Manual --------------------------------- This manual is now on commercial release, as I found the other weekend when I went to Heffers (an excellent chain of bookshops here in Cambridge) and saw several copies on the shelf! It is published by Prentice-Hall, edited by Jaggar, has ISBN 0-13-736299-4 and retails for about UKP 35. If you need to know the ins and outs of ARM Architectures 3 and 4 (including ARM610, ARM710, the extended math operations of ARM7M, the Thumb extensions, StrongARM and the forthcoming ARM8xx) from a software engineer's point of view rather than the more hardware-oriented view presented by the IC datasheets, buy it. We have. Perhaps I should be trying to charge commission for this shameless advertising, but it really *is* that good :-) Allocations ----------- A quick reminder... allocation of filetypes, SWI chunks, and in fact just about every other allocatable resource is now handled by Pineapple Software. Email your binaries as generated by !Allocate (or plaintext if you wish to claim a resource which !Allocate doesn't anticipate) to allocate@pinesoft.demon.co.uk Large Hard Discs ---------------- It has been found that map consistency problems can arise when using hard drives which have contiguous RISC OS partitions >=2Gb in size. These problems can arise on RISC OS 3.60 or 3.70, and their symptoms are typified by machine freezes when copying files, strange filesystem behaviour (inability to delete unlocked files etc) and bad maps when tested with *checkmap. The solution to these problems is to reformat the drive using the new beta version of !HForm (http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/updates/hformbeta.arc ) and configuring ADFSBuffers to 0K. These problems do not arise on smaller drives. Risc PC 2 --------- For want of a better working name, this is what we're calling "the next big machine" as expounded on by Peter Bondar during his presentation at Acorn World. Please don't expect any definite technical statements about this machine yet; our hardware guys are currently operating in "heads down" mode to implement IOMD 2 and produce, rationalise and ratify the spec around it, so until this happens the system is a moving target. Once the spec crystallises, I'll be pushing for documentation to be made available to Developers so that you can determine your strategies as pertaining to designing products for this machine. Fun times are ahead! Application Note 297 -------------------- A new Application Note has been produced which aims to address and offer solutions to many of the hardware problems observed in the field regarding the interaction between StrongARM, the Risc PC motherboard and / or PC Cards. It is now available as http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/docs/appnotes/297.arc or 297.ps. I stress that this document is *CONFIDENTIAL*; neither it nor the information it contains may be allowed to propagate outside the Developer community except by direct issue from ourselves. Comments on the content would be appreciated (direct to me rather than isvquery). NetStation ---------- NetStation, the Acorn implementation of the Oracle NC Reference Design, should be available in small numbers for sale as of the end of this month; the vast majority of the units for sale will have modem cards and be aimed at the end-user market, however a very small number will be fitted with Ethernet cards. These Ethernet-equipped machines will not be CE approved, and will contain the EtherN card (no other card can be substituted for the EtherN currently, as this card is the only card with its driver in the current NCOS ROM build). Pricing details will be issued to you as a matter of priority once they become available. These Ethernet NetStations will ship without any server-side boot sequence bundle; in order to develop for and test compatibility of your applications with NetStation (most should work, btw), you will need to set up your own NetStation boot server. ART recommends utilising a UNIX system for this task (BSD and System 5 -based systems, and Linux, are all capable of doing the job so strictly we cannot recommend any flavour of UNIX above any other), at which point you will need root access to set up bootp, nfs and http daemons. Guidelines on procedures, recommended export points and suggested configurations are currently being written (Yours Truly is part of the collaborative documentation team), and will be made available on completion. Freeware UNIX source and binary distributions for Risc PC may be found at http://www.ph.kcl.ac.uk/~amb/riscbsd/riscbsd.html (RiscBSD) and http://www.arm.uk.linux.org/~rmk92/armlinux.html (ARM Linux); these distributions may be in various states of comprehensiveness but please be understanding (the authors have other careers to hold down, and considering the fact that the online fruits of their efforts are written in their spare time the level of achievement so far is nothing less than remarkable). Alternatively, if you have an IBM-compatible PC sitting in a corner gathering dust, even a 386 can run PC Linux or a freeware BSD-alike well enough to act as a development server for NetStation booting. Whichever server route you decide to go down, make sure that you know what you are doing; I can't provide general UNIX support, and as installation of either of these Unices requires that a drive be partitioned it may be a good idea to acquire a new scratch drive for the UNIX image. The boot sequence which is exported to the NetStation by the server can now be downloaded (thanks to special dispensation from Network Computer division), in beta form and without Java or "foreign" format video support for the time being, as http://www.art.acorn.co.uk/SALES/DEVELOPERS/resource/reference/nc/bootstrap.tar.Z ; although it isn't a great deal of use without a NetStation, you may wish to peruse its organisation, take a look at the "look and feel" of the html frontend and application launcher, and generally cogitate on what it would take (if anything) to install your applications within this hierarchy so that a NetStation could run them. This distribution is best placed within a directory /export/ncd on your server (create it if it isn't there; chances are it won't be) in readiness of exporting, where it may be extracted with uncompress bootstrap.tar.Z followed by tar xvf bootstrap.tar You will also need to set the ownership of the main boot hierarchy to the unprivileged user "nobody" (chown -r nobody /export/ncd/boot usually; check man chown on your system for your specific implementation of the recurse option before issuing) as this is the UID which the NC signs on with for its boot phase. Please be aware that the tweaking which has been done to the sequence has been done by me at the request of Network Computing, so although it should all work with a correctly configured NetStation it's my fault if it doesn't! Please talk to me rather than NC division should problems with the sequence arise once you have a NetStation. More complete documentation on server-side installation and configuration, and on SmartCards, will follow in due course (hopefully the next couple of days, but interrupt-driven as I am, you never can tell). Please be patient. Cheers, Dave