[wellylug]The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills

[Richard Hector]

On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 21:01 +1200, Donald Gordon wrote:

> Well, actually, at least on x86, there are some weird instructions you 
> need to produce that it's probably fairly hard to make your compiler 
> emit: the instructions to switch into protected mode (for the 
> bootloader), and the instructions to make system calls (for libc).
> 
> In the bootloader case on x86 this is even worse, as the processor 
> starts up in 16-bit mode, but generally you want to be running 32 bit 
> code in protected mode.  So you'd have to compile the bits of the code 
> that ran before and after the switch differently, too, and set up the 
> stack for 32 bit mode, and all that sort of fun.

Ah, well, if your compiler is incomplete ...

[ducks]

Richard
PS One reply is enough, thanks.