Re: Bootloader for 32-bit x86 programs

[Francois-Rene Rideau <fare@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Myron,

> The attached NASM source file will be of interest to those of you who want
> to ditch your OS completely and take direct control of your PC-AT
> (in)compatible without BIOS, DPMI, Windoze API or whatever. As a .COM
> program, it has been seen to either a) work as expected or b) cause a
> system reset under test on various 386+ systems.

May I point you to Tom Novelli's RETRO, a bootable Forth-based OS
for the 32-bit PC-AT, now completely written in FORTH (meta-compilable
from gforth thanks to a port Frank Sargent's Pigmy Forth's RPN assembler).
	http://retro.tunes.org/
If you hate RPN assembly, Retro also includes old versions written in NASM;
or you could port the prefix assembler from Win32Forth.

As for the particular bug you experience, it looks quite like a problem
in the keyboard chipset driver. Programming the PIC right accross all
implementations of the PC chipset including buggy ones is a very tricky
thing to do. One way is to do _exactly_ like Linux or another OS that works.
Just trusting the documentation is, in my own experience,
not enough to work everywhere.

You may find (some but not much) help on os-help@tunes.org
and other such mailing-lists.

Best regards,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
There's no worse blasphemy than to claim to know what pleases or displeases
God. Hence prophets and priests are the most impious men on earth.