BCC...

[Eric W. Biederman]

ron minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> writes:

> On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Takeshi Sone wrote:
> 
> > Some OSs call 16-bit BIOS services in VM86 mode.
> > In that case you can't switch to 32-bit mode by yourself.
> 
> how about we list those OSes, see if they can be fixed, or if we don't 
> care.
> 
> what does windows do?
VM86 mode...  At least the windows 9x kernel.  NT?

The important point to note is that gas has a directive ``.code16gcc''
which directs gas to assemble 32bit code that runs in 16bit mode and
in vm86 mode.  So if we can fit everything in 256K we are fine.

So when doing a rewrite of rombios.c that is readable we should try
that.  256K is a little tight I admit but if we don't go beyond simple
standard features it is enough.

The fundamental point here is that you can write 32bit code that
will run in VM86 mode.

Eric