Maths, pt1 and other news

I recently found a really awesome project, MOSA (Managed Operating System Alliance). I haven't had more fun hacking and breaking code in a long time. It's just really neat being able to write your operating system in C#.

One of my projects is building an operating system that performs floating-point arithmetic and fast fourier transforms as kind of a benchmark for the operating system/Ahead-Of-Time compiler. A few years ago, I ported John Walker's FBENCH to C# and I thought this would be an excellent candidate for the task. He also has a benchmark, FFBENCH (Fast-Fourier Transforms) which I plan on porting in the next few days as well.

The MOSA project, however, is quite young compared to other projects like it. It isn't very complete at all and isn't really useful yet. I plan on helping out with this a bit. For instance, I took the trig functions John Walker uses in FBENCH (he defined all the trig functions in case you didn't want to use math.h) and moved them over to C#. It wasn't terribly difficult, just a bit tedious. If you would like a copy of these methods, you may get them here. If all goes well and according to plan, these methods will go into Korlib, the core library MOSA uses for the OS.

I will be making a post in the next few days regarding the ports of the two math benchmarks to C#, and maybe even an image of my OS that can run in QEMU! A new release had been made of the benchmarks since I ported last, so this morning was spent porting the new FBENCH to C# and it is working quite dandily (is that a word?). FFBENCH should be even easier. There are a few tests I want to run regarding these benchmarks. Speed of Mono vs .NET arithmetically and the speed of using System.Math vs my methods. Hopefully I have some good results to show soon.


Also, in other news, the OpenVAS Build Repo has added a 10.10 repository for Ubuntu. I have been testing it on my network here with virtual machines strewn about the house and everything seems dandy! I highly recommend you check it out if you are interested. As soon as I get a bit more free time, I will be releasing two virtual appliances updated to run the od-autoassess script (x86 and x86_64) on Maverick with all the new features I have implemented in the script.

Adding the repository is easy, and you can follow my guide here (updated yesterday) to get a new VM up and running. If you find any problems, let me know!