The ability to do preemptive multitasking was discussed in a previous log. The code was checked in almost 6 months ago, but it's taken until this week to finally debug and test. The following demo image shows the kernel executing the memory dump command and three other CPU instances each updating the colors in a single column on the screen.

It took the development of several additional features to set up the context switching and initialize the various CPU instances (note, each CPU has its own RAM bank and there's no way one CPU to access another's RAM bank).

A Boot Loader is used to initiate the CPU instances and each CPU context will copy a different section of code to initiate that CPU and memory bank. CPU 1 is the kernel and the only context that can issue a BOOT command. On start up the kernel issues this command to each of the other CPUs and then updates the context switching table to set the sequence and priority for the other CPUs. Each CPU will then boot as the context is switched to that CPU instance. The boot loader then copies the code related to that CPU and starts execution.

The example above gave each CPU an equal weighting. This results in about 15 KIPs to each CPU and is the reason why the memory dump is running fairly slow.