Modules and drivers

These documents describe the modules and drivers that can be loaded at run time to add functionality to FreeDOS-32.

atadrv.o - ATA driver [documentation not available]
A driver to grant block access to ATA disks connected to IDE controllers.

biosdisk.o - The BIOSDisk disk driver
BIOSDisk is a simple but effective FreeDOS-32 driver for disk devices. As its name suggests, it uses the ROM BIOS to access disk devices. This could sound strange for a 32-bit protected mode operating system: BIOSDisk has been developed to have disk support while waiting for 32-bit disk drivers. If supported by the ROM BIOS (most BIOSes do), BIOSDisk can use the IBM/MS Extension to access media greater than 8.4 GB, with Large Block Addressing (LBA).

cdrom.o - CD-ROM driver [documentation not available]
To access sector data on ATAPI CD-ROM on top of the ATA driver.

clockdrv.o - CMOS Clock driver [documentation not available]
A driver to get the current date and time from the CMOS clock.

consdrv.o - Console handler [documentation not available]
If a keyboard driver is installed, this driver formats the data read by the keyboard driver according to standard console operations.

dpmi.o - DPMI Driver services
The DPMI driver lets DOS protected-mode applications to be run on FreeDOS-32, providing them the DPMI and DOS Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) they expect. This document is a summary of system calls recognized by the FD32 DPMI driver.

fat.o - FAT driver
A driver that allows FreeDOS-32 to use the FAT file system, the standard one for DOS and Windows machines.

floppy.o - Floppy driver
A loadable driver providing native floppy disk access by managing the floppy disk controller (NEC765 or compatible).

iso9660.o - ISO 9660 driver [documentation not available]
A driver to access data stored in CD-ROMs using the standard ISO 9660 file system.

keybdrv.o - Keyboard driver [documentation not available]
This driver lets FreeDOS-32 read data from the keyboard.

nls.o - Native Language Support
Although this should be not necessary because of Unicode, for compatibility with legacy software (such as short file names in the FAT file system) FreeDOS-32 may need to deal with national code pages. The Native Language Support (NLS) manager is an optional loadable module which provides support for handling national code pages.

psmouse.o - PS/2 mouse driver [documentation not available]
A driver providing support for a mouse connected to a PS/2 mouse port.

sermouse.o - Serial mouse driver
A loadable driver providing support for a mouse connected to a serial port (only COM1 at present).

unicode.o - Unicode Support Library
The character set used by FreeDOS-32 is ISO-10646 (or UCS, the Universal Character Set), that is, since the two standards are practically identical, Unicode. The Unicode Support Library provides FreeDOS-32 support for Unicode strings processing.

winb.o - Basic Windows-compatible environment [documentation not available]
A module providing compatibility with console applications developed for the Windows platform.