Kernel v4.41 Upgrade

Obsolescence of legacy Atmel and Winbond 256Kbyte and 512Kbyte flash chips has prompted an upgrade of the on-board RTOS kernel of Mosaic's QCard, QScreen, Handheld Controllers. The change should have no consequences for most users' existing application code base.

Your code is affected only if you are using the Wildcard Carrier Board. In that case, your existing code will still work, but you will need an updated install.txt file to load your code onto new controller boards. The best way to get that file is to update your kernel extensions at the Kernel Extension Manager.

All customers are encouraged to update their kernel extensions to the most recent versions by using the Kernel Extension Manager.

Prior supported Atmel and Winbond Flash chips are now obsolete. We have redesigned the Flash-writing routines in the kernel to support newer chips¹⁾ which have a variety of write-sector sizes and require varied erase and write procedures. Whereas before writing to Flash required only a small write buffer, located in common RAM, some Flash chips now require a larger buffer, which must be located in paged memory.²⁾

The upgrade from Kernel v4.40 to v4.41 adds smart multi-flash-chip support to the kernel routine TO.FLASH and incidentally fixes a statistics bug in the mathematical function RANDOM.GAUSSIAN. No calling addresses of any routines in the kernel are changed; they are all the same as v4.40. Consequently, you do not need to recompile your code to run on v4.41; any S-record or other application code image compiled on v4.40 will run correctly on v4.41. The kernel routine TO.FLASH in v4.41 reads the flash type, and supports legacy Atmel and Winbond 256Kbyte and 512Kbyte flash chips, as well as the SST29SF040 and SST39SF040 512Kbyte flash chips.

All v4.41 controller boards are shipped with an SST29SF040-70-4C-NHE Flash device. As that device uses the smallest buffer size in on-board RAM, the change is completely without consequence to end-user's application code.

However, if you currently use a Wildcard Carrier Board you should update your kernel extensions to force an update of the install.txt file used to install your application code on the board. You can then recompile your application code using the updated kernel extensions.