More DOS regressions due to instruction emulation changes

Jukka Heinonen jhei at iki.fi
Wed Sep 17 08:54:09 CDT 2003


In addition to breaking protected mode programs,
instruction emulation changes have also broken
many real mode programs. 

Instruction emulation code was previously used to
emulate not only protected mode instructions but
also some real mode instructions. For example,
ioport instructions (inb,outb,...) were emulated
using that code. 

Now, these instructions raise an exception that
will not be caught by any handler because real mode
code may not have been called via K32WOWCallback16Ex,
which seems to be the place where instruction emulation
hooks in. 

There are many different ways of fixing these problems,
one possibility is to make K32WOWCallback16Ex call
VM86 stuff from NTDLL when special magic parameter is
passed to it so it can install the correct exception handler.
Another is to export instruction emulation hook or
exception handler from kernel. Anyway, this is something
I don't probably want to decide, even if I had more time
available for this. A better fix for protected mode
programs would be welcome, too.

-- 
Jukka Heinonen <http://www.iki.fi/jhei/>



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