Re: Paging Beth Stone

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:18:45 -0400, wolfgang kern <nowhere@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Why don't you/we all make up a list of what an OS should support
in Low-Level ASM-terms and create an ALA-OS which fits all the demands.


Damn, I had to hit Google to figure out the ALA in ALA-OS meant...

Some time ago I discovered MenuetOS. I thought "this is awesome" and then I looked at the API and thought "what the fucking hell!" I would have been content to leave it at that were it not that every page on the site says "MenuetOS - The Assembly Lanugage Programmer's OS" and I figured that anyone making a statement like that about such an awful OS design needed a good talking to.

So I went to their forum and posted this:
http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=2814

In the end I had a little discussion on OS design going on on my web site. It was going pretty good for a couple of weeks until someone started discussing how the GUI should handle hotkeys, and at that point I guess everyone lost interest, and I went on to work on some Z80 stuff.

I've thought about making my own OS since then, but I'd have to make my own assembler or compiler or something to program under it with, and I have a phobia when it comes to that sort of thing. Even so, I did manage to make a pretty nice assembly parser in NASM, but then I got to looking at the effective address encodings and that about made me sick. I hate parsing user input.

Even so, reading the Intel manual, it's not entirely obvious to me how Intel ever intended someone to make a multitasking OS with the features they put into the 386. The best idea I've come up with is to keep the nested task bit set in the TSS of all tasks (except interrupt tasks), and make an interrupt task that, when called, modifies the return task field in it's TSS so that when it does it's iret a different task will run. However, I can't find any indication that that's how Intel expected you to do it.

It all seems to be a few inches over my head.
.