Here's my personal opinion, and that's all it is. But I'm not sure I'd recommend using the plain name "FreeDOS" for something that needs a 32-bit CPU... I think I'd prolly call it something slightly separate to make it clear this is a spinoff, kind-of like Digital Research had their Concurrent DOS/386 and Concurrent DOS/XM. Just my opinion.
How would I go about it? I'd prolly have a way to either kickstart it from BIOS or EFI, and would probably replace BIOS calls with a 32-bit interface, thunking down to 16 as necessary, basically wiring something like EMM386 into the system. It might need to have USB support at the system level and be able to remove drive allocations (somewhat like umount on Linux or perhaps more like Safely Remove Hardware on Windows). It would still superficially resemble DOS, but the EXE loader would need to load certain types of 32-bit binary directly such as GO32 COFF or Watcom extended rather than going 32-16-32 to load dos4gw or whatever. I would think that SOME of the userland could still remain 16-bit, but other parts would need to be ported up to take advantage of the system having the capability of more than 640K RAM. -uso. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming! The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
