[1668] in linux-announce channel archive
New free DOS extender for cross-development from Linux
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lars Wirzenius)
Sat Feb 3 13:51:00 1996
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 04:28:18 +0200
From: Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cc.helsinki.fi>
To: linux-announce@vger.rutgers.edu
From: baford@cs.utah.edu (Bryan Ford)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: New free DOS extender for cross-development from Linux
X-Original-Date: 2 Feb 1996 02:48:02 GMT
Organization: University of Utah Computer Science Department
Keywords: DOS, cross-development, GCC
Approved: linux-announce@news.ornl.gov (Lars Wirzenius)
Followup-to: comp.os.linux.development.apps
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MOSS: a new DOS Extender for cross-development from Linux
Written by Bryan Ford of Sleepless Software
and the Computer Systems Laboratory at the University of Utah
Available from: ftp://flux.cs.utah.edu/flux/moss
[Please redistribute this announcement to anyone who might be interested.]
MOSS is a new DOS extender designed especially for cross-development
of DOS applications from Linux or other Unix-like operating systems.
It has a number of major features:
* Can be used royalty-free in commercial and non-commercial products.
* Full support for DPMI, VCPI, XMS, and "raw" DOS modes.
* Supports up to 2GB of virtual and physical memory.
* Demand-loading of executables for quick startup times.
* Supports POSIX low-level file I/O as well as ANSI C I/O.
* Processor exceptions can be delivered as POSIX signals.
* Hardware interrupts can be delivered as POSIX.1b real-time queued
signals (except under DPMI).
* Traditional-DOS-extender-like interrupt revectoring also available
in all environments.
* Supports the POSIX.1b memory locking API ({\tt mlock} et al).
* Remote source-level debugging over a serial line using GDB.
* Full cross-development from Linux and other Unix-compatible OS's.
* Uses i386 ELF object files and executables.
* Allows a program {\em and} any associated data files
to be attached to MOSS, forming one big DOS executable.
* Written almost entirely in easy-to-modify C code.
* Can be compiled _completely_ using the freely-available GNU
development tools (i.e. doesn't require a commercial
compiler/assembler to handle the 16-bit x86 code).
MOSS is a new DOS extender primarily targetted for people who must write
DOS programs for some reason or another, but want to have as little to do
with DOS as possible. (Like us, for example.) To this end, MOSS is
primarily intended for cross-development from "real" OS's rather than for
native development under DOS. MOSS's remote source-level debugging support
makes it extremely convenient to write DOS programs if you have a DOS test
machine sitting next to a Un*x-compatible development machine.
Furthermore, MOSS's API attempts to hide much of the ugliness of DOS under
a Un*x/POSIX veneer, for example by providing POSIX-like file I/O, POSIX
signals for intercepting processor exceptions and hardware interrupts,
POSIX mmap() for mapping device memory such as the video buffer, etc.
Note that MOSS is still at beta-test level: it is still missing a number of
highly desirable features, contains a few horrible kludges, and no doubt
has a few bugs... As such, NO WARRANTY, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, EVER, etc.
etc. etc. However, we have found MOSS to be quite usable for our purposes
and reasonably robust and compatible, so we decided to release it to the
public at this stage even though it is still incomplete.
Once again, MOSS is available from `ftp://flux.cs.utah.edu/flux/moss'. The
file `moss-0.90-bin-linux.tar.gz' contains pre-compiled cross-compiler
tools that run on Linux, as well as a pre-built copy of MOSS itself. The
file `moss-0.90-bin-freebsd.tar.gz' contains the corresponding pre-compiled
binaries for FreeBSD. The file `moss-0.90.tar.gz' contains the sources and
further documentation. (The documentation is also available in separate
files in this directory.)
- ---
Bryan Ford baford@cs.utah.edu University of Utah, CSS
`finger baford@schirf.cs.utah.edu' for PGP key and other info.
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--
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