Date: Fri, 8 Apr 94 15:00:15 -0400
From: dj AT ctron DOT com (DJ Delorie)
To: babcock AT cfa DOT harvard DOT edu
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Re: uploads to cygnus - dll, farptr, V2.0 src


> I'm confused.  How can a protected mode program interact with things like the
> DOS file system without an extender?

DPMI *is* an extender.  When in DPMI mode, all go32 does is load the
program and handle int21 requests.  In V2.0, these are done by the
stub and libc.a (respectively).

>                                      Do you really mean that you have
> written an extender which can be built using only tools which will be
> provided as part of djgpp?

No.  The stub loader can be built without non-djgpp tools, and the
library has always been built that way, but there is no extender.

>                             To remove the requirement of BCC or other C
> compiler would seem to require that you provide a DOS linker and assembler or
> C compiler of sufficient power that they can be used to build themselves.

The new piece of this puzzle is a program called "djasm" that
assembles a single source file and produces a single binary (one step)
in the format of an include file that stubify.c includes.  Stubify is
compiled with gcc.  djasm is compiled with gcc.  You need 1.11 to
bootstrap it, but after that it builds itself.