[nos-bbs] The 'NOS for WIN32' project ...

[Maiko Langelaar (ve4klm)]

For anyone who is interested ...

I get a bit 'technical' here, sorry if it blows you away.

For the last little while I've been working on porting NOS to the WIN32 
environment, suffice to say it's a very stripped down version right now,
but today I can report that I have a WIN32 console app that is actually
running the NOS kernel context switching code, can read keyboard input,
use the basic MBUF functions to pass information between the keyboard
process and the main process. I've created test daemons which this NOS
is running perfectly fine, while all the other stuff is going on at the
same time. Is this a big deal ? I think so, since the context switching
code - ie, PWAIT - is fundamental to NOS working at all.

I'm using Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition - excellent tool !

BUT - there are big challenges down the road ! The big ones involve
differences in how Linux and Windows treat the following :

    select()
    interval timers
    signals

With regard to keyboard input, I've managed to get around the use of
the select(), but with a penalty. The WIN32 NOS sitting idle waiting
for keyboard input consumes a bit more CPU then one might desire. I
can live with what I see so far. I just want to see how well this
works down the road, so I'll keep on playing.

The big thing for me right now is seeing PWAIT(0) working as it should.

Bye the way - I'm doing this on Windows XP.

Regards,

Maiko Langelaar / VE4KLM