I've been watching this list for a while and I'm happy development is continuing! The last time I tried playing around with ELKS, I couldn't even get things to compile, and had I succeeded, I got the feeling I wouldn't be too impressed. In case anyone's interested, my wishlist: Support for 100% BIOS I/O (eventually I'd like to run this on non-standard hardware, Sanyo MBC-55x, so any in/out opcode and interrupt hooking will fail to work as intended). Where necessary, BIOS RAM can be probed and this shouldn't be a big problem. Support for reserving some low memory area (again due to hardware constraints). Some method to transfer data to/from FAT12. And, a question... how feasible would it be to run anything with 256KB RAM? I was tempted to reply to the EMS code message because to make a useful ELKS machine out of these, I may have to design a memory expansion board, and I've got lots of 4MB SIMMs laying around. Otherwise without kernel bankswitching support (or through EMS calls) I believe I can do 960KB. I also have a strange memory management idea that may be interesting... Since 8086 is a 64KB segment oriented machine and you are already bumping up against the limitations of that, and there is talk of changing compilers... how crazy would it be to design a new segmentation ABI to allow relocation of segments and still allow programs to use more than 64KB? I'm thinking something along the lines of, instead of using mov DS,AX type instructions, these are changed to an OS call, so that the kernel knows what segments the userspace is using, and when it has to relocate data, it can simply rewrite the stored CS,DS,ES,SS of the userspace, and next time the userspace needs to switch segments, it asks the OS to do the dirty work. Managing >64KB allocations is possible too but basically the program needs to request a 64KB window into the data at a time. This would probably be pretty directly applicable to a bankswitching scheme as a poor man's MMU. Sorry for the craziness but I've spent many hours pondering this stuff in the past... if there's interest I'd be happy to put together a specification of sorts. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
