This should really be more than one commit, but I wrote everything in one
shot and I don't feel like arranging the changes logically into different
commits. So, these are the changes:
- added WOFS (Write Once File System). This is a writeable file system that
exists in the MCU's internal Flash memory and allows files to be written,
but only once, in a single shot. More details to follow.
- the platform interface has a new MCU flash access interface.
- added WOFS "reference implementations" for two CPUs: LM3S8962 and
STM32F103RE. They are easily extendable to other CPUs in the same platform
and can be taken as a model for other platforms.
- the ROMFS file layout in memory was slightly changed.
- the simulator (src/platform/sim) got a new function (lseek).
- shell: now each shell command receives its arguments in a C-main-style
(argc, argv) pair. This was originally Marcelo's idea and it finally
made it to the master (although this particular implementation is mine),
after I got fed up with all the argument parsing in the shell functions.
- new shell command: wofmt ("formats" a WOFS, effectively clearing it).
- a couple of small fixes in the shell code
This patch adds more RAM optimizations to eLua:
- direct file memory mapping: files in ROMFS will be read directly from Flash,
without allocating any additional buffers. This doesn't help with RAM
consumption in itself, but enables the set of optimizations below.
- pseudo read-only strings. These are still TStrings, but the actual string
content can point directly to Flash. Original Lua strings are kept in
TStrings structures (lobject.h):
typedef union TString {
L_Umaxalign dummy; /* ensures maximum alignment for strings */
struct {
CommonHeader;
lu_byte reserved;
unsigned int hash;
size_t len;
} tsv;
} TString;
The actual string content comes right after the union TString above.
Pseudo RO strings have the same header, but instead of having the string
content after TString, they have a pointer that points to the actual
string content (which should exist in a RO memory (Flash) that is directly
accesbile from the MCU bus (like its internal Flash memory)). lua_newlstr
detects automatically if it should create a regular string or a pseudo RO
string by checking if the string pointer comes from the Flash region of the
MCU. This optimization works for both precompiled (.lc) files that exist in
ROMFS and for internal Lua strings (C code).
- functions in Flash: for precompiled (.lc) files that exist in ROMFS, the code
of the functions and a part of the debug information will be read directly
from Flash.
- ROMFS was changed to support files that are larger than 2**16 bytes and it
aligns all its files to an offset which is a multiple of 4 in order to prevent
data alignment issues with precompiled Lua code.
- the Lua bytecode dumper was changed to align all the instructions in a Lua
function and a part of the debug information to an offset which is a multiple
of 4. This might slightly increase the size of the precompiled Lua file.
These changes were succesfully checked against the Lua 5.1 test suite.
These changes were tested in eLua on LM3S and AVR32.
Added another "romfs" parameter to SConstruct. It can take one of 3 values:
- "verbatim" (default): copy all the files from the eLua romfs/ directory to the binary image (exactly what happened until now)
- "compress": use LuaSrcDiet (http://luaforge.net/projects/luasrcdiet, now included in the eLua distribution) to "compress" the source code by using different tricks (shorter identifiers, removing comments and EOLS, and so on). The output is still a compilable Lua file (although in most case it looks completely different from the original) which is copied in the eLua binary image instead of the original Lua file. The compression obtained by using this method seems to be very good in practice, thus it will save flash when needed.
- "compile": use the eLua cross compiler (that must be built first by running 'scons -f cross-lua.py') to precompile the Lua files to bytecode, and write the bytecode to the image instead of the source file. This way, one can save both time (the scripts don't need to be compiled anymore) and RAM (for the same reason, especially since the Lua parser uses the stack a lot, which can lead to very nasty and hard to diagnose stack overflow bugs). It will be even more useful in the future, when (hopefully) more and more Lua bytecode data structures will be available directly from Flash (without having to copy them RAM as it happens now). It might also decrease the romfs memory footprint, but then again, it might not; it pretty much depends on the Lua programs included in the romfs.
mathlib (sin, cos, tan and all the other functions from there).
- corrected "pwmled.lua" (removed a debug print)
- bumped version number to minor versn 0.4.1
