> I ponder about writing a "i386 16bit realmode" gcc backend as my master > thesis - which would be usefull for generating 16-bit bios code needed > by the virtual machine developed at my university.
It's been done a couple of times already, first by me, and later my code was extended by a couple of other people. Don't know if you want to start from scratch "on principle" though, otherwise search the mail archives. > Having never programmed any compiler-related stuff and having a > strict deadline (after 6 months) i would appreciate some commments > about the complexity of such a venture. It's not that bad, at least pointers are a reasonable size (int-sized). IMHO the trick to setting up the registers is to assume a bank of one-byte registers and use HARD_REGNO_NREGS to build up the larger registers, rather than trying to use subregs to access parts of larger registers. Arrange the registers such that DX:AX pairs are adjacent too.
