Posts: Os

Making NetBSD Multiboot-Compatible

This article first appeared on this date in O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com online publication. The content was deleted sometime in 2019 but I was lucky enough to find a copy in the WayBack Machine. I reformatted the text to fit the style of this site and fixed broken links, but otherwise the content is a verbatim reproduction of what was originally published. The i386 architecture is full of cruft required to maintain compatibility with old machines that go back as far as the 8086 series. Technically speaking, these features aren’t necessary anymore because any recent computer based on this architecture uses a full 32-bit operating system that could work perfectly fine without the legacy code. Unfortunately, the compatibility hacks remain in place and hurt the development of new software.

March 1, 2007 · Tags: <a href="/tags/featured">featured</a>, <a href="/tags/netbsd">netbsd</a>, <a href="/tags/onlamp">onlamp</a>, <a href="/tags/os">os</a>, <a href="/tags/programming">programming</a>
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