> This is already what DOS does, sort of. DOS has no separation of > access rights, so there is no userspace, but it has a layered > system of drivers. The kernel supports BIOS int13 drives as well > as FAT filesystems. After booting, you can load drivers to give > the kernel access to the sectors of other FAT drives, such as ZIP, > USB drives or ramdisks, and the kernel does the FAT handling. > > Or you load drivers based on the network redirector and its close > cousin the "CDEX" (mscdex, shsucdx) for optical drives. Without > CDEX, a cdrom/dvd driver only gives you raw sectors and audio but > DOS would not know that files can exist on CDs and DVDs etc ;-). > Note that the shsu... drivers also support mounting ISO images.
The common problem of both interfaces is that they don't communicate anything between each other. So if someone has written, lets say, a DOS block device driver that allows DOS to access USB storage media, and then you load some redirector-type DOS NTFS driver you (usually) still won't be able to access NTFS partitions found on USB storage media. In fact, I don't know any redirector that uses DOS's block devices for device access instead of relying on direct Int13 access. Anyway, such discussions should probably be on Freedos-kernel. Christian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
