[LinuxBIOS] Booting into MSDOS

Janek Kozicki janek_listy at wp.pl
Fri May 18 18:07:58 CEST 2007


Ceri Coburn said:     (by the date of Fri, 18 May 2007 16:08:34 +0100)

> Correct me if I'm wrong here guys, but LinuxBIOS as it currently stands 
> does not setup the old BIOS interrupts that DOS uses, which means 
> booting DOS from LinuxBIOS would be a big change
> 
> Martin - booting Windows/Linux is a different as they have their own 
> drivers for various hardware that is present within the machine

That's true: linux does not use BIOS to read the hard drive or display
text or graphics on the monitor. It's logical to assume that
LinuxBIOS does not provide them.

DOS uses BIOS for all that basic functionality, in such a way, BIOS
acted by providing a "generic" driver that DOS used. "Generic"
because the interrupts and their arguments were the same regardless
of their implementation which varied from one manufacturer to another.

OTOH LinuxBIOS is able to print text on the monitor, so if Martin's
software does not require graphics (like good'n'old int 13h) then
perhaps it wouldn't be too difficult to add a simple redirection
layer that can execute some common BIOS interrupt calls.

An alternative is to use dosbox (very slow, about 50% of processor
speed). I'm afraid that dosemu will not work here (very fast, about
95% of processor speed - I used it to run DOS version of fractint to
calculate mandelbrot set).

-- 
Janek Kozicki                                                         |




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