Hi! > A port of DOS to ARM would not be bound to any existing API and would not > need to be compatible with any existing DOS implementations, while still > being a port of DOS.
Well we already HAD a port to another CPU in the early times of FreeDOS: After all, it acts a bit like a library with an API on one side and invocations of the BIOS on another side. I have no clue what sort of BIOS you can expect from common ARM computers and whether they have a BIOS at all - probably no, just a boot loader and lots of information for making your own drivers? In any case, the main problem is: Which apps will run on your ported DOS? With the other port, the answer was "very few and you had to port them from open source DOS apps yourself", but at least porting was easy for apps which avoided direct calls to the BIOS and direct hardware access. If you port to ARM, you will probably have to compete with Linux because Linux already runs on ARM and many apps have already been ported to various ARM versions of Linux. The advantage of DOS, as usual, will be a low memory and disk footprint, while it will lack built-in network, multi-threading, multi-tasking and memory management support. Only for some of those, library solutions for DOS are available (in particular the first and last item on the list) but those libraries are very specific to PC hardware and will be quite hard to port to DOS. If you want built-in support, you still have to provide the function in your ARM-DOS in some other way. There also are a number of hobby operating system where people thought "well, I could make an OS from scratch, then it will have all the API that I want without all the overhead of any larger OS, plus I like challenges". Almost all such OS have exciting but one-person histories and barely any apps for them. Still, they probably are worth the excitement for the author. Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
