Hello Steve Nickolas,
I've had ideas for bootstrapping a DOS using a separate IPL - and in fact FreeDOS did do this at one point. This way, I'd be able to keep basic drivers out of the main kernel, enhancing portability - which wouldn't be a big deal with PC-compatibles, since the basic drivers would essentially be the same. But on other systems, maybe you would want to be able to swap IPLs (one for floppy disks, one for FAT16, one for FAT32 as an example), or swap console drivers (maybe you're running on a system that doesn't speak BIOS and needs to speak to the keyboard and display some other way)...and keep the kernel itself down to a
I think having separate modules for non-IBM-compatibles is not as weird as it might seem --- the historical division between io.sys and msdos.sys existed for a reason. Actually, with Intel talking about deprecating support for legacy BIOses and CSMs on newer UEFI machines, I think the idea of a DOS having to support non-IBM-compatibles sounds even less far-fetched now. (Having separate pluggable modules for FAT16 and FAT32 is something else, though.) Thank you! -- https://github.com/tkchia :: https://gitlab.com/tkchia _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
