July 27-28: Trying to improve the arith.c file:

• Reducing number of global variables: in particular the err_val, tok and incomplete variables
• Strategies for string management
• Modify strtoul to handle a +/- sign (there are cases when I need to 'recognize' negative numbers)

However, it's turning out to be a rather difficult task. The err_val and tok should have been easy to unify, but there seems to be a memory leak problem, when an error is encountered after a string token is found (and allocated). The string management is another problem. The parse_arith() function takes a struct string as input. The input() function goes along the same struct string to get the next token. But, the parsing functions dynamically allocate space for the result. I find this tree-like method of operation simpler to handle. But this can easily cause memory leak problems on parse errors, which is something I'm still trying to fix.

July 29-31: Unified the err_val and tok variables. The tok variable now takes negative values on errors, and the 'forgotten' string token is freed before setting it. It's back to valgrind and gcov for testing. An interesting issue I didn't notice is using an int to store the difference between pointers. Apparently this will not work in a 64-bit environment, so I had to use longs at all these places. Size check: Before (official gPXE source):

 321	     16	      4	    341	    155	bin/shell.o
 548	     88	      0	    636	    27c	bin/bios_console.o
 629	      8	      0	    637	    27d	bin/exec.o
 2365	     95	      2	   2462	    99e	bin/comboot_call.o
 81784	  11300	 139774	 232858	  38d9a	(TOTALS)

After (quoting and arithmetic parser):

 11	     24	      0	     35	     23	bin/serial_console.o
 335	     16	      4	    355	    163	bin/shell.o
 577	      8	      4	    589	    24d	bin/exec.o
 1322	      0	      0	   1322	    52a	bin/parse.o
 2232	      0	     20	   2252	    8cc	bin/arith.o
 2377	     95	      2	   2474	    9aa	bin/comboot_call.o
 84571	  11236	 139798	 235605	  39855	(TOTALS)

And the bin/rtl8139.rom has grown from 55808 to 57344B. Latest commit in the scripting_test branch: Arithmetic parser

August 1: Weekly meeting today. Today's topic was getting the patches merged into gPXE. Had a discussion with mcb30 on the generic stack implementation. The stack and struct string idea was started to let the parser work without having to deal with issues like memory allocation, and also to help other modules that will use stacks. The current implementation is just a wrapper around an array to push and pop elements. The disadvantage is that since the array is fixed, the stack has a limited size. mcb30 recommended that I use the list_head structure and macros to implement an unbounded stack, that can accomodate as many elements as required. The basic skeleton is:

struct stack {
    struct list_head list;
};

struct stack_element {
    struct list_head list;
    char data[0];
};

#define STACK( _type ) \
    union {						\
        struct stack stack;			\
        _type type[0];				\
}

#define STACK_PUSH( _stack, _data_len )			\
    ( ( typeof ( &(_stack)->type[0] ) )		\
    stack_push ( (_stack)->stack, _data_len ) )

#define STACK_POP( _item )				\
    stack_pop ( _item );

void * stack_push ( struct stack stack, size_t data_len ) {
    struct stack_element *element;
    element = malloc ( sizeof ( *element ) + data_len );

    if ( ! element )
        return NULL;

      list_add_tail ( &element->list, &stack->list );
      return &element->data;
}

void stack_pop ( void *data ) {
    struct stack_element *element =
          container_of ( data, struct stack_element, data );
	list_del ( &element->list );
	free ( element );
}

August 2: Worked on the stack today. A few modifications to yesterday's ideas:

• Added a stack_for_each macro to help iteration over the stack.
• I had some problems with passing the stack to a function. The type information is held in the union, but actually passing the union to a function needs to have the data type clearly defined. So, I passed only a pointer to a struct stack, which removed the type information.
• Hence, I made the STACK_PUSH macro take the type of the new element, and call the push_stack function with the sizeof(type) argument.

 #define PUSH_STACK( _stack, _type ) ( _type * ) stack_push ( _stack, sizeof ( _type ) )

This will retain the type information without the union, but it requires the user to know the type of element being pushed, and this may lead to mistakes. This stack implementation seems to add around 135B to the uncompressed code.