CompuServe Thread

"And it is very handicapped by its device driver design, which is 16-Bit only and NOT preemptive multitasking." Since I haven't written any device drivers in awhile, I'll let a message from OS2USER forum speak to this point. " One can put 32-bit code into device drivers nonetheless. After the required 16-bit data and code segments for the device headers and entry points, pretty much anything is fair game. We have an OS/2 physical device driver that uses a flat 32-bit data segment that can exceed 400kB in size, for instance, and lots of 32-bit code sprinkled throughout. Virtual device drivers are fully 32-bit. They were introduced with OS/2 2.0. PDDs carry the 16-bit architecture of OS/2 1.x, and, many, if not most, OS/2 1.x driver binaries can run just fine under 32-bit versions of OS/2 if necessary to support custom legacy applications and/or hardware. Chris Myers Electronic Project Engineer Quatech, Inc. " Those virtual device drivers are also preemptively multitasked… "Even old Windows 3.1 is a real, 32-Bit preemptive multitasking Kernel on this level," I also really question this statement, as Win 3.1 doesn't ever preemptively multitask unless you cheat by using an interrupt to do your task switching. IMHO, not a good idea, is it can crash the system much to easily. Bob Comer — Cheyenne, WY USA Team OS/2