On 20 Dec 2003 12:33:28 GMT, (Huge) wrote:

The Natural Philosopher writes:

[17 lines snipped]

BUT these states have to be explicitly coded into the BIOS

This has nothing to do with the BIOS. BIOSes are a PC-ism, anyway.

etc. In all
OS's I have designed or been aware of, the CPU at best sits in a tight
loop waiting for some kind of interrupt from somewhere - most frequently
the system timer. Then it probably rushes off to do a few timer related
housekeeping tasks, nips round its scheduler to see if other interrupts
have actually triggered the need to so timeslice code before going back
to doing an endless loop or summat.

The kinds of functionality we are talking about here takes place "below"
the O/S level (not that W/98 is much of an O/S in the first place). (Despite
my earlier facetious remark about O/S idel loops...)

Not one at all AFAICS. A monitor maybe, and not a particularly good
one. A house built on sand? Definitely. OS? Nope. May it rest,
finally, in peace.

..andy

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