🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <865985059snz@wash.demon.co.uk> john@wash.demon.co.uk (John Washington) writes:
>
> [snip]
> 
> Sounds like time to wheel out the idea of dynamically loaded
> modules for ka9q again?
> 
> One way would be to write an NE-executable loader, add
> support for DLLs, and construct ka9q itself from one
> or more such DLLs.
> 
> Heck, if you had the stomach for it you could give those
> modules names like, er, how about USER, KERNEL and GDI?
> 
> ;-)

The Phar-LAP 286 (or 386) DOS extenders allow you to do this.  I've
built a protected mode version of ka9q and the changes necessary to
clean up the code to be operarable in an extended environment are quite
small.  However I didn't get as far as doing the serial port work, but
running on packet drivers it was fine.  With 286 extender, you
have a 16meg address space, and seeing whole megs of free memory was
very strange...

Then you could have .DLLs, dynamically loaded, and/or unloaded.  the
concept is well proven in Galacticomm's MajorBBS system, which uses just
such an approach; there is a single executable with the core
communications and scheduling stuff, and then all the user level
services are provided as DLLs.




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