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A Look At Bootstrapping
markmcb writes "OmniNerd posted an interesting article on the often-overlooked process of bootstrapping. The author does a nice job of showing how to take an x86 system from BIOS to OS once it's powered on. A complete set of commented code is provided and explained in the article."
This actually doesn't look that bad at all. I mean, I'm technically a *design* student, but I've wrote assembly of similar length for things like atmel avr microcontrollers before. I can actually follow a good portion of this, and being as I'm not a computer scientists, I'd say that makes it fairly easy (in the grand scheme of things -- there is a lot of C++ code that just goes WAY over my head).
I agree. And the thing that puzzled me most is why it isn't ditched even when there is a chance to do so. For example, when AMD designed x86-64, which is incompatible with x86 by nature, they still made i t almost like x86, shortcomings and all. It has few registers (although they recognized the problem and gave x86-64 more registers), and the instructions are variable length, complex, irregular in format, and with various side effects, making them hard for compilers to target and hard for the CPU to decode.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
That's a very insightful article. You know, I'm always amazed by people that sit down and start writing a new OS. I was impressed by BeOS and am very impressed by ReactOS. I'm using a Mac, and I only run Win98 inside Qemu, but as soon as ReactOS can run everything I need, I'll switch for sure! I just wish I had time to contribute to such wonderful projects!
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To you it might look old and convoluted. To me, it looks like a design sharpened by natural selection. The old 16-bit modes stay, because they have vestigial uses and they aren't sufficiently problematic to make the chip "evolutionarily unfit".