On Wed, 7 Jul 1999, Blaz Antonic wrote:
> The problem is that i don't really understand that pmode example on
> www.x86.org .. it's weird. The only person that seemed to have a clue
> about 286pmode dissapeared without producing any usable results.
One way of looking at it is that 286pmode is a subset of
386pmode... the most important thing to remember is that there is no
paging and segments are at most 64K long.
> Maybe Alan Cox will have some time eventually to explain what needs to
> be changed in order to switch to pmode (memory allocation, interrupt
> handling and kicking out BIOS drivers i presume).
Here are some quick notes:
- There should be a complete working set of direct HW drivers. I
guess if you were starting out one could just use a console driver to see
if the main kernel worked. But it wouldn't be too useful.
- The segment malloc system could probably be used after modifying
it to work with 256-byte 'segments' and a descriptor alloc/free system.
- Interrupt handling can be handled in regular Linux fashion.
- Chad
