[HN Gopher] The Windows 3.1 Virtual Machine Control Block Part 1...
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       The Windows 3.1 Virtual Machine Control Block Part 1 (1994)
        
       Author : userbinator
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2021-10-08 04:01 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (archive.retro.co.za)
 (TXT) w3m dump (archive.retro.co.za)
        
       | anyfoo wrote:
       | There were so many fantastic, deep dives into the inner workings
       | of operating systems and below in Dr. Dobbs Undocumented Corner.
       | 
       | I also highly recommend Robert R. Collins articles for Dr. Dobbs
       | (they are easy to find), which shed light on, at the time, many
       | undocumented features of the Intel CPUs of the day.
        
         | watersb wrote:
         | Thanks! I wasn't aware of these, despite being a subscriber for
         | a couple of years.
         | 
         | This seems to be an online collection of these articles:
         | 
         | http://www.rcollins.org/ddj/ddj.html
        
       | twoodfin wrote:
       | Unlike its ultimate successor in Windows NT, I feel like the
       | story of the design and evolution of the Win32 kernel & the
       | resulting triumph of Windows 95 as an honest-to-goodness
       | protected memory, preemptive multitasking OS hasn't really been
       | told.
        
         | nonesuchluck wrote:
         | Possibly I'm misunderstanding your post. In what sense did
         | Windows 95 have protected memory? Even DOS programs could
         | overwrite important Windows addresses, to say nothing of the
         | convenient win32 APIs MS provided to scribble all over other
         | applications memory space.
        
           | twoodfin wrote:
           | Windows 95 absolutely had protected memory: Every 32-bit
           | process had its own address space without direct access to
           | any other process' memory.
        
           | kevingadd wrote:
           | Yeah it was "less unprotected" at best. It was also trivial
           | to deadlock the entire machine with user-mode code (the
           | DirectX system-wide mutex being the most obvious example)
        
           | dblohm7 wrote:
           | DOS programs were run in V86 mode.
        
         | userbinator wrote:
         | Moreover, the fact that it's actually more like a bare-metal
         | hypervisor that runs DOS VMs seems to be little-known. The
         | protection is the bare minimum necessary to keep them isolated
         | - all hardware, unless specifically virtualised by VxDs, is
         | effectively "passed through".
        
         | Rerarom wrote:
         | Yeah I'd like a Showstopper book for Windows 95.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-09 23:01 UTC)