On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 12:30:49PM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Looking at the various specifications there is an additional route we can take. We can have the 16bit trampoline detect if it is running in v86 mode, and if so use the appropriate DPMI/VCPI/XMS functions to switch to protected mode instead of our hand crafted code.
That should allow us to run under Win9x, freedos, and djgpp. For Freebsd we will probably need a couple of the very most common calls implemented in the 16bit trampoline as well. And of course we can still implement the legacy entry points.
Very interesting.
It is not clear what an Option ROM will care about so being as backward compatible as possible is a real plus.
Going with a solution that can (at least in theory) handle all of the legacy backwards compatibility cases will allow us to concentrate on a single implementation.
Going with a solution that is primarily 32bit C code will allow us to reuse the code in appropriate ways.
Not using v86 mode by default will allow a high degree of compatibility anyway.
Does a version of ADLO that runs as 32bit C code sound reasonable?
What do you think about non-x86?
-- Takeshi