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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).
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!
Get a free Video iPod!
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".