winscape 2248

Its a low-budget x86 only non-symbolic debugger wa very limited buttembler built in. You can use it to load programs and single-step, print and modify memory, print and modify registers. It can set breakpoints too. It won't give stack traces, nor is it aware of the program's symbol tables. IIRC, it cannot step over subroutine calls- either you let the program run or you can execute the next 'n' instructions. So its similar to a very primitive rom based 1st stage boot loader, except it can load & save programs. Basically worthless except for the simplest & smallest programs. Since its ubiquitous, debug probably of most use to 100 level compsci courses in x86 buttembly programming. You can certainly type buttembly code to your heart's content but all memory references are to addresses, relative jumps must be computed by the programmer, no symbols, no macro buttembly, no listings, no crossrefs, no .text-.bss-.data sections to help you manage & debug it, not to mention it read-writes only binary files so configuration management is made difficult.

With some augmentation it would probably make a pretty good boot loader for PC's since some very basic buttembly-disbuttembly features are helpful and it can read-write hardware readily enough to do minor probing & troubleshooting of device issues if you know the addresses & registers.

Or Solaris. Linux is getting there, but its got a ways to go yet.

I think he means that if you start having multiple tasks then you need something to help manage them. DOS as-is has nothing whatsoever, so if nothing else, adding a "list process" tool and a "kill process" tool would be necessary.

And it also won't scale well to multiple processors if the OS critical sections aren't very carefully designed, else each additional cpu adds less and less until there is a net throughput loss.

Gregm