HAL Step accumulation question

Hopefully this question makes sense to you all and Ive put it in the right place. Im a Software engineer by trade, looking to get into CNC as a hobby. As I was exploring the HAL examples, a question came to me that i haven't seen an answer to. For a simple step gen based controller, rather than generate an individual step pulse for each axis, is there a way to accumulate the steps in each cycle so that they could be synchronized. what i mean is, is there a way to get the step pulses from HAL as a sequence of bitmasks? for example for up to 8 axis the step cycle could be two HAL calls per cycle set_dir(10101111) followed by step(10001000), where a one means step and 0 means dont step. this would seem to be a much faster way to send the pulses in sync via a DMA or serial message. Have I missed something? Does this exist or is it just not worth the effort for some reason?

This is certainly doable with a hal component.
For example just the scaled d/dt of position waypoints
would give you the steps per servo thread
this could be further processed into convenient
length bitstream samples.
(things like setup and hold delays and the required catch-up
would have to be factored in to the bitstream)

This is not terribly different than the way most current LinuxCNC hardware
step-generators work (most are rate generators with position feedback to accommodate
time base differences and setup/hold delays on reversals)

Thanks,
Given that Hardware step generation was already on my radar, i might be better to stick with what I'm given in the stepgen example and then look toward hardware based step generation. If I have to implement the timings myself, I may as well learn to do it on the other end.

Thanks again,
-Jacob

After reading the code in stepgen.c, it looks like i might be able to tease the data I want out of the step pulse loop pretty easily by overriding the user defined step type and managing a shared pinmap. Overriding quadrature mode for my testing would seem to be the easiest way, do you happen to know if everything will still run correctly even if i don't 'connect' the output pins f the stepgen to anything?

it is open loop. Linuxcnc has no way of knowing if the stepgens are connected to anything.