Tuesday 12 January 2010

Interrupts and exceptions

Yay, the weather finally turned. By the end it was just getting crazy - I'd accidentally left open a window in the house all day (or for a few days) and half of the house must've been 35 or more. Didn't think it was worth cooling it down - I just barricaded myself in a smaller part of the house with separate ac. A bit of rain too, not really enough but it'll do.

Should've got out digging in the yard this afternoon once the rain stopped but instead i've been poking around trying to get some stuff working on the beagleboard. I was trying to get AGG to render some stuff - but it's C++, and I don't really know enough about the execution environment of C++ to get it to work. But not even malloc() works in C, so for now i'm just trying to get that working (it uses newlib, and it crashes before it gets to calling sbrk()).

Since all I was getting was at best a silent death, I figured I'd work out a little about exceptions too - at least find the address of the crash. I misread the bit about interrupt vectors at first and spent a lot of time chasing that down ... I was writing a vector of addresses to the interrupt vectors, but it's actually a jump table. I found this out early on but forgot to fix the code and went off on a very long-winded goose chase trying to work out what was going on after some mis-direction from the mailing list archive. Well with the hot weather I hadn't been getting much sleep, so perhaps there's an excuse!

Well it told me it was crashing in malloc - but i knew that already. Can't easily figure out what's going on without source (it's something to do with static intialisation), so downloading the newlib source now (actually the whole toolchain), which is gonna take forever since I blew my quota.

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