[Freedos-32-dev] Re: UDI alternatives

[Dave L. <da...@fr...>]

Salvo Isaja wrote:

> Hello guys,

Hello Salvo!

> after one more day of UDI specs reading, I'm even more convinced that if
> we'll use UDI we'll never write FD32. Until now, the FD32 Survey doens't
> show any predominant preference, hence we still have many alternatives.
> 
> 1. Using a cut-down of UDI...
>
> 2. Since UDI is not properly what Guideline #1 of our System Specification
> says, we could discard UDI and develop our own internal interface...
> 
> My personal preference is the second option, but I don't now if/how this is
> realizable. I think UDI is very important, because a serious drawback of DOS
> systems today is the lack of drivers for modern devices (I think to sound
> cards, for example, or USB devices AFAIK), but we have to keep FD32 simple.
> 
> Let me know if you have an idea of such an eventually UDI-extendible
> internal interface. Meanwhile I think...

I think that we can get FD32 off the ground quickly by simply
_not_having_ device drivers to start with.  We can implement the bare
necessities in the kernel (VGA, keyboard, and Hard/Floppy disk), then
once FD32 boots and has a complete API we can go back and add UDI (or
another driver system maybe).

This is good because by the time we look at UDI, they will have a
complete 'reference implementation' that we can copy and hopefully we
won't have to write much code ourselves.

- D

<da...@fr...>