cfenollosa_os-tutorial/16-video-driver

Concepts you may want to Google beforehand: VGA character cells, screen offset

Goal: Write strings on the screen

Finally, we are going to be able to output text on the screen. This lesson contains a bit more code than usual, so let's go step by step.

Open drivers/screen.h and you'll see that we have defined some constants for the VGA card driver and three public functions, one to clear the screen and another couple to write strings, the famously named kprint for "kernel print"

Now open drivers/screen.c. It starts with the declaration of private helper functions that we will use to aid our kprint kernel API.

There are the two I/O port access routines that we learned in the previous lesson, get and set_cursor_offset().

Then there is the routine that directly manipulates the video memory, print_char()

Finally, there are three small helper functions to transform rows and columns into offsets and vice versa.

kprint_at

kprint_at may be called with a -1 value for col and row, which indicates that we will print the string at the current cursor position.

It first sets three variables for the col/row and the offset. Then it iterates through the char* and calls print_char() with the current coordinates.

Note that print_char itself returns the offset of the next cursor position, and we reuse it for the next loop.

kprint is basically a wrapper for kprint_at

print_char

Like kprint_at, print_char allows cols/rows to be -1. In that case it retrieves the cursor position from the hardware, using the ports.c routines.

print_char also handles newlines. In that case, we will position the cursor offset to column 0 of the next row.

Remember that the VGA cells take two bytes, one for the character itself and another one for the attribute.

kernel.c

Our new kernel is finally able to print strings.

It tests correct character positioning, spanning through multiple lines, line breaks, and finally it tries to write outside of the screen bounds. What happens then?

In the next lesson we will learn how to scroll the screen.