Hi Najmus, > I want to write an academic paper on freedos kernel > and its internal working features.
Nice idea :-). Actually there is a whole book about the original version of the DOS-C / FreeDOS kernel: www.monmouth.com/~patv/ I doubt that the wiki tells much about the internal workings of the kernel at the moment. You can read Ralf Brown's Interrupt List (RBIL) to get lots of information about all sorts of PC related APIs and BIOS and hardware interfaces and everything: www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/ralf/pub/WWW/files.html As FreeDOS is meant to be DOS compatible, it has to mimick lots of MS DOS properties. For example when you read data from a file on disk, your request goes through a whole MS DOS style pipeline of layers, to allow all sorts of MS DOS compatible drivers to work with FreeDOS. Think of network/cdrom drivers, ramdisk, caches, buffering, TSRs which hook file access... So while RBIL only has limited information about FreeDOS specific topics, it still tells you a lot about the FreeDOS kernel because FreeDOS is a DOS kernel :-). The original DOS-C kernel was less biased towards this sort of lowlevel compatibility. Pat just wanted to make a kernel - written mostly in C - which implements the main int21 API of DOS, I guess. But you better ask him in person :-). FreeDOS still is written in plain C for most parts. This makes the code easier to read and maintain compared to a kernel written in Asm language. Luckily it does not make the kernel slow or big, not at all :-). Things that do make the kernel are for example the complex memory layout and having to keep lots of data structures and structural layers similar enough to MS DOS to keep things low level compatible. For example if you know that nothing accesses the "list of lists" and "swappable data area", then you could move several kilobytes of data from the first 640k kilobytes into the HMA and/or make FreeDOS less complex. But by not having LoL/SDA in low ram, some driver level compatibility would be lost. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-kernel mailing list Freedos-kernel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-kernel
