Asif Haswarey wrote:
With that arrangement, the amount of dictionary space available to plug-in device drivers was virtually unlimited!
Weel, I ran into this problem while testing (QLogic iSCSI) FCode I had developed for the SPARC. I experimented with a dummy fcode consisting of only constant declarations. The FCode failed to get interpreted when the total tokenized size reached just a little above 50KB (that's kilo-bytes). Unfortunately I system OBP would not let me use the "here" word to find out the exact size of the dictionary space my dummy FCode used up. So I figured the dictionary space available for my FCode is basically a portion of the overall dictionary space available to the system. In short, every device FCode has a limit of dictionary space available to it.
Is my understand correct? If so, then this is what my question is about concerning OpenBIOS.
Well, it's not an inherent characteristic of Open Firmware, nor of OBP. It might depend on the platform where you were running your test. If it was one of the E{3..6}{0,5}00 servers, that would be consistent. Incidentally, what happened when you hit the limit?
As for seeing "here" from FCode:
defer my_here ' noop to my_here " here" $find if to my_here then
( you might need a "drop" after the "if"; I forgot whether $find returns just the XT or the "immediate" indicator, too...)
Then you can rock'n'roll with my_here to show you where you are...