On 8 Mar 2004, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
The PCBIOS compatibility code in rombios.c has quite a few warts. Primary among them is that it written in a nasty mix of asm and 16bit C code. With the biggest problem seeming to be that bcc is a limited 16bit compiler.
I don't much like this code.
In real mode there is 256K that we can place a real mode BIOS in. If all we do is stick to what a PCBIOS can do now, and don't attempt to extend it, but just be a good implementation 256K should be enough to do whatever is needed.
we're back to square one. Why do this when we can do emulation? I think I don't see what you're planning here.
I don't know if gcc using 32bit overrides in 16bit mode would be better than a pure 16bit C compiler.
one less compiler is always good to me.
So if the issues keeping us from using 16bit C compiler are primarily cosmetic I don't see why they can't be fixed. Long term I don't even want to touch a compatibility layer. I want to use something much simpler and much more powerful.
I don't see the reason long term for rombios.c or 16bit C compilers. I guess I'm missing something.
ron