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definitions again (Developers)

posted by kerravon, Ligao, Free World North, 19.03.2024, 15:52

> DOS is a "disk operating system". It is an operating system that does the
> basic I/O functions so that the programs don't need to do those themselves.
> DOS handles the filesystems and console I/O without restricting what the
> programs themselves can do.
>
> Most DOS operating systems on x86 have the same standardized ABI as DR-DOS,
> MS-DOS, FreeDOS and others.
>
> Amiga also has a DOS kernel on its ROM. It does the same things but of
> course it is not compatible with any DOS on x86. The CPU instruction set is
> also different.
>
> Unix is the original definition of POSIX. Other POSIX-compliant operating
> systems are Unix clones. Modern POSIX does a lot more than DOS. POSIX
> operating systems are (usually) multitasking and they have a standardized
> API, but no standardized ABI.
>
> API means Application Programming Interface. It is the higher-level
> "human-readable" interface that is used in calling conventions of C library
> functions.
>
> ABI means Application Binary Interface. It is the low-level interface that
> is used by the compiled programs to make syscalls to the kernel.
Ok, and is FreeDOS considered to be "DOS" then? ie does being ABI-compatible create the definition? API is not enough? What if FreeDOS has a bug, or has a bug fix, or lacks a feature, that makes it not exactly the same as MSDOS? And if a bug in MSDOS 1.0 is fixed in MSDOS 2.0, does that make it not compatible?

Switching to Linux - PDOS/386 supports a subset of the Linux ABI. It would need to contain 100% (or more) of the Linux ABI in order to be called Linux?

I guess you could say that for something to be "DOS" it would need to support the published API of any version of MSDOS. It doesn't matter if it doesn't support undocumented APIs. And bugs and bug fixes are not counted either way.

But Linux is Windows. Or is adding the WINE subsystem not allowed because it's not in the base kernel?

And PDOS/386 is not Linux - it is only a Linux (and POSIX) subset. Although it may support more than Linux 0.01 already. So then what?

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