Originally, the convenience utility for accessing a process
configuration came in the form of a header file. But this causes
aliasing problems if multiple compilation units access the config while
the configuration gets dynamically updated. Moving the implementation of
the accessor to the singleton object into a library solves those
problems.
This patch simplifies the way of how Genode's base libraries are
organized. Originally, the base API was implemented in the form of many
small libraries such as 'thread', 'env', 'server', etc. Most of them
used to consist of only a small number of files. Because those libraries
are incorporated in any build, the checking of their inter-dependencies
made the build process more verbose than desired. Also, the number of
libraries and their roles (core only, non-core only, shared by both core
and non-core) were not easy to capture.
Hereby, the base libraries have been reduced to the following few
libraries:
- startup.mk contains the startup code for normal Genode processes.
On some platform, core is able to use the library as well.
- base-common.mk contains the parts of the base library that are
identical by core and non-core processes.
- base.mk contains the complete base API implementation for non-core
processes
Consequently, the 'LIBS' declaration in 'target.mk' files becomes
simpler as well. In the most simple case, only the 'base' library must
be mentioned.
Fixes#18
This patch introduces support for ROM sessions that update their
provided data during the lifetime of the session. The 'Rom_session'
interface had been extended with the new 'release()' and 'sigh()'
functions, which are needed to support the new protocol. All ROM
services have been updated to the new interface.
Furthermore, the patch changes the child policy of init
with regard to the handling of configuration files. The 'Init::Child'
used to always provide the ROM dataspace with the child's config file
via a locally implemented ROM service. However, for dynamic ROM
sessions, we need to establish a session to the real supplier of the ROM
data. This is achieved by using a new 'Child_policy_redirect_rom_file'
policy to handle the 'configfile' rather than handling the 'configfile'
case entirely within 'Child_config'.
To see the new facility in action, the new 'os/run/dynamic_config.run'
script provides a simple scenario. The config file of the test program
is provided by a service, which generates and updates the config data
at regular intervals.
In addition, new support has been added to let slaves use dynamic
reconfiguration. By using the new 'Child_policy_dynamic_rom_file', the
configuration of a slave can be changed dynamically at runtime via the
new 'configure()' function.
The config is provided as plain null-terminated string (instead of a
dataspace capability) because we need to buffer the config data anyway.
So there is no benefit of using a dataspace. For buffering configuration
data, a 'Ram_session' must be supplied. If no 'Ram_session' is specified
at construction time of a 'Slave_policy', no config is supplied to the
slave (which is still a common case).
An example for dynamically reconfiguring a slave is provided by
'os/run/dynamic_config_slave.run'.
Norman Feske