[Oberon] Improving Oberon-0

[Walter D. Gallegos]

Pieter:

Our comercial project can be beneficied with this improved and gain
experience with Oberon-0 environment will be usefull other tasks, but we are
busy with the project itself.
If you don't have others help and can wait a bit time, I can check your
notes and tray to do.

Walter

----- Mensaje original -----
De: <muller at inf.ethz.ch>
Para: <oberon at inf.ethz.ch>
CC: <muller at inf.ethz.ch>
Enviado: Lunes, 05 de Agosto de 2002 05:56 p.m.
Asunto: [Oberon] Improving Oberon-0


> "Douglas G. Danforth" <danforth at greenwoodfarm.com> wrote:
> > When trying to decide if one's machine is capable of running
> > Native Oberon or Bluebottle such a Wizard written for MS Windows
> > or Linux would seem appropriate.
>
> I think time would be better spent improving the Oberon-0
> environment, especially diagnostic information when things
> go wrong.  There is no guarantee that the environment
> detected or presented by Linux or Windows is the same as
> what would be seen when Oberon is booted.
>
> A big step forward would be to write code to switch back
> and forth between 32-bit protected mode and 16-bit real mode
> on-the-fly.  This would allow more BIOS functionality to be
> used.  E.g. if Oberon-0 runs into difficulties, it could use
> BIOS INT 10H to switch back to text mode and at least output
> a readable TRAP.
>
> Extended BIOS facilities would also benefit normal Oberon,
> since it would allow using VESA 1.2 bank-switching in a
> generic display driver.
>
> I've done some work in this direction with the V86 module,
> which creates a virtual-86 mode task for executing 16-bit
> BIOS code.  However, the environment is not perfect, since
> some instructions need to be emulated in V86 mode (this
> has not been done).  A better approach might be to just
> switch to plain old real mode.
>
> If anyone is interested in attacking this problem I can
> dig out some of my old test code as a starting point.
>
> Another possible improvement for Oberon-0 would be to
> set up a mechanism for using the PCITools module to
> scan for hardware.  This won't work on older machines
> without PCI buses, but would be a big improvement on
> newer machines.  A database of PCI ids and the matching
> driver modules would have to be built.
>
> -- Pieter
>
> --
> Pieter Muller, Computer Systems Institute, ETH Zurich / MCT Lab, Zurich
> Native Oberon OS: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/native/
> --
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