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Multicore suppport for DOS is real – partly

49 pointsby beebixlast Sunday at 8:06 AM9 commentsview on HN

Comments

vintagedaveyesterday at 8:21 PM

So this seems to be a mystery binary someone found on a company DVD, that runs DOS on one core and runs another core with code but no interrupts etc. Fascinating.

The thread later mentions a second way to do it.

In this setup, how would cross-core communication work, including cross-thread? On DOS is there even the concept of threads, or would an app using this have to invent user-mode thread objects and scheduling?

show 3 replies
PaulHouleyesterday at 10:03 PM

Certainly if you do not call out to DOS or the BIOS! All the time with DOS we would write text to the screen by writing it into memory because it was so fast and if you wrote a terminal emulator you would catch the interrupts and write to the UART registers in assembly or C or Turbo Pascal. You only needed DOS for the filesystem otherwise the application could do anything that DOS could do.

Old versions of Linux had a giant lock on the whole kernel which would let only one CPU enter the kernel at once. You could probability protect DOS the same way at the cost of scalability.

ronsoryesterday at 8:03 PM

> ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR

Hm?