Updates to MicroBitButton and MicroBitMultiButton to align the API through
which CLICK events are filtered. Also, updates to the mechanism through which
buttonA and buttonB CLICK/LONG_CLICK events are filtered by
MicroBitMultiButotn to reduce RAM footprint.
No changes to external behaviour of these classes.
MicroBitMultiButton now provides an indication to MicroBitButton instances when an application is actively utilising that button as part of a button group. This
permits that MicroBitButton to more accurately filter events, and provide a
consistent abstraction.
More specifically, this patch:
- Extends the MessageBus functionality to indicate when listeners are
attached to events. This allows components to perform on demand tailoring
of their behaviour.
- Extends MicroBitMultiButton to indicate to relevant MicroBitButton
instances when they are part of a button group.
- Extends MicroBitButton to perform filtering of button events dynamically
(rather than statically) when part of a MultiButton group.
- Code cleanup of static functions that are more cleanly implemented as
methods.
- Add maximum depth for event queues, to prevent buggy scripts causing total memory exhaustion.
- Suppress generation of A/B click events when A+B click is generated
- preservation of event ordering on messagebus for resursive event generation cases.
- bugfix of message bus processing to prevent occasional dual processing of events
- bugfix MicroBitDisplay to behave correctly when delay parameter is zero.
All message bus listeners with the micro:bit runtie are non blocking, and safe to be called
in an interrupt context. As such, these have now all been declared MESSAGE_BUS_LISTENER_IMMEDIATE
which should mitigate all unbounded event queueing effects.
This release contains a widespread set of updates and optimisations to the micro:bit
runtime, with a view to reducing the SRAM footprint of the whole system. This is to
provide as much usable HEAP storage for application programs as possible.
Specific updates and optimisations include:
- Additional compilation flags to allow the core micro:bit runtime to be configured.
These are defined in MicroBitConfig.h
- A custom heap allocator. This is now included for two reasons:
1) To provide a simple mechanism to to utilise both the mbed heap space and other memory
regions (such as unused memory in the SoftDevice region) as a single virtual heap.
2) To address some issues that have been noted that are attributable to heap fragmentation.
The micro:bit heap allocator has a simple algorithm, but one that is chosen to respond
well to the relativelt high 'heap churn' found in the micro:bit environment.
All micro:bit components and user programs now use this heap allocator trasparently.
- Updates to BLE services to remove persistent references to their GATT services. This consumes
vast amounts SRAM, rather unecessarily. Instead only handles to the relevant GATT characteristics
are now stored. This specifically includes:
+ MicroBitDFUService
+ MicroBitEventService
+ DeviceInformationService
- Updates to the Fiber scheduler to save SRAM. More specifically:
+ Removed the need to hold an empty processor context to intialise fibers.
+ The IDLE fiber now runs without a stack
+ fiber stacks are now only created when a fiber is descheduled for the first time, thereby reducing heap churn.
+ the 'main' fiber is now recycled into the fiber_pool if it leaves app_main()
+ fibers created through invoke() now only maintains the necessary part of teh parent stack that is needed, thereby
reducing the stack size of spawned fibers.
- Updates to the Message Bus to reduce the overall memory footprint of processing events. More specifically:
+ Event handlers are now always called using invoke(), such that non-blocking event handlers no longer need
a dedicated fiber to execute - thereby saving SRAM and processor time.
+ Processing of events from the event queue is now rate paced. Events only continue to be processed as long as there
are no fibers on the run queue. i.e. event processing is no longer greedy, thereby reducing the number of fibers
created on the runqueue.
- Updates to BLUEZOENE code to bring up core BLE services even if they are not enabled by default. This allows
programs that do not require BLE to operate to benefit from the full range of SRAM, whilst still allowing the
device to be programmed over BLE.
- Updates to the Soft Device initialisation configuration, reducing the size of the GATT table held in the top 1.8K
of its 8K memory region to around 800 bytes. This is sufficient to run the default set of BLE services on the micro:bit
so the additional memory is configured as HEAP storage by MicroBitHeapAllocator.
- Minor changes to a range of components to integrate with the above changes.
+ rename of free() to release() in DynamicPWM to avoid namespace collision with MicroBitHeap free()
+ rename of fork_on_block to invoke() to enhance readbility.
- Many code cleanups and updates to out of date comments.
This is the first commit of the microbit-dal on GitHub.
This repository contains the runtime, which is a light
weight operating system developed by Lancaster University.
Joe Finney