[GNUz] O/S compare

[Jim Cheetham]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 10:11:58AM +1300, Richard Tindall wrote:
> I once tried a search to discover whether msdos.sys or io.sys was the M$ kernel, unsuccessfully.

Both? With some features offloaded to the firmware BIOS.

http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/dos-windows-boot-process.html

> Out of the box, the DOS that is booted will be Microsoft's MS-DOS,
> whose kernel image is contained in files named io.sys and msdos.sys
> (more on this later) in the root directory of the boot volume. Other
> DOS operating systems have their kernel images in different files.
> DR-DOS (a.k.a. OpenDOS) and IBM's PC-DOS hold their DOS kernel images
> in files named ibmbio.com and ibmdos.com in the root directory of the
> boot volume. FreeDOS holds its DOS kernel image in a file named
> kernel.exe in the root directory of the boot volume, which is loaded
> by a loader contained in the file named ipl.sys.

But, because the architecture of Microsoft's operating systems is unlike
Unix, the term "kernel" doesn't map exactly.

-jim