On Tue, 29 Dec 2020, Mercury Thirteen via Freedos-devel wrote:
On Tuesday, December 29, 2020 11:44 AM, Steve Nickolas [email protected] wrote:
...
I've had ideas for what I'd do if I were writing my own OS or my own DOS
clone... but they'd probably be too weird for this list.
...
But I, for one, would love to hear those ideas.
Well, maybe some people would be interested. ;) Feel free to ignore the
rest of the post, because it's really gonna go off into lala land,
although some of it does relate to FreeDOS.
I actually really dig DOS, although I'd prolly stir in a little bit of
OS/2 and NT if I were coding for a more advanced CPU. And prolly make the
shell a bit more like the Bourne shell - which really isn't that big a
deal, the Bourne shell was a major influence on COMMAND.COM.
I've had ideas for bootstrapping a DOS using a separate IPL - and in fact
FreeDOS did do this at one point. This way, I'd be able to keep basic
drivers out of the main kernel, enhancing portability - which wouldn't be
a big deal with PC-compatibles, since the basic drivers would essentially
be the same. But on other systems, maybe you would want to be able to
swap IPLs (one for floppy disks, one for FAT16, one for FAT32 as an
example), or swap console drivers (maybe you're running on a system that
doesn't speak BIOS and needs to speak to the keyboard and display some
other way)...and keep the kernel itself down to a minimum, just plugging
in what it needs at boot time. And with this kind of a system, things
like mouse.com or mscdex.com wouldn't be implemented the same way they are
on DOS.
What I think would result from this is a sort of modularity similar to
Linux, but with a more DOS-like footprint. At this point it wouldn't be
DOS anymore - it will have sacrificed too much, and will have morphed into
a strange mutant beast, perhaps similar to Microsoft's unreleased "XEDOS",
not quite DOS, and not quite a Unix, but somewhere in between, where it
would load like Linux, the command line would feel about like Linux but it
would more or less be able to run MS-DOS applications.
On the other end, I've been doing some experiments with UEFI, and mused
about the possibility of creating a 64-bit "DOS". Again - wouldn't quite
be DOS. But it would almost resemble OS/2 1.0, with its task switcher,
and the ability to run DOS apps - transparently, not in a penalty box like
OS/2 1, but like 32-bit Windows. This could be more DOS-like; but the
more I thought about it the more I realized it would bear far more
resemblance to OS/2 without the Presentation Manager. It would probably
have to have NT-like USB support, allocating drive letters on the fly -
and it would need to emulate legacy hardware for the sake of legacy
software, although newer and cleaner APIs could be provided to expose the
real hardware to native software. The command shell would need to more or
less emulate CMD.EXE. This concept would also need to be able to emulate
stuff like GO32 and DOS/4GW, for the many 32-bit DOS apps that rely on
them.
-uso.
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