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                          Focus Kernel Development
                          ========================

Here are a few things you should know if you've got comments or pathches,
or want to get into developing the Focus Kernel.


1. Portability
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Although the only target supported so far is the Z80, the goal is to keep
things as platform-independent as possible. This is why the majority of
the source is in C, with just a little assembly language where needed, and
why non-ANSI C language extensions have been avoided.

In theory, to port the kernel to another target shouldn't require much
work. The architecture-dependent parts of the C code are surrounded by
'#ifdef ARCH_<whatever>' directives, and all assembly code is located in
the appropriate subdirectory of src/arch.


2. State of the Project
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As the kernel is in the early stages of development, a lot of the code is
rather less than efficient. The size of the produced kernel image is also
way too large at the moment. The current plan to help this situation is to
rewrite some architecture-specific stuff in assembly.

Note also that some of the supposedly 'standard' functions (e.g. prinf())
may well have decidedly non-standard behaviour.


3. Contributing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Any contributions gratefully received! Please supply any patches as a
diff against a particular version distribution to either
<focus-bugs@cosam.org> for bug fixes, or <focus@cosam.org> for other
patches.