Re: how to crash your OS

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren write:

an old DOS app grabs nearly 100% of the CPU and then that app locks up
(or vice versa).
-- flash  wrote:
Hardware Abstraction Layer.


Very interesting. But what I was reporting originally was more than an
application or even system crash. It was a physical reboot: screen went
blank (not just the BSOD), then started blinking Ditigal/Analog (which
it what this monitor does before or after the system unit is turned on
or off, because it has both inputs and doesn't know what it's getting if
it isn't getting anything). Furthermore, I had to power down from the
surge suppressor, then power up again and press the on-off switch to get
it back up. (And then sit through Scandisk, which is fine and proper,
but I LOATHE that snarky message of BBBG's: to avoid seeing this
message, always shut down your system properly. As if we had any choice.)
As for reasons, I think we must distinguish: a piece of hardware that
has its own BIOS (as I think all modern VGA cards and all SCSI
controllers do) will load that BIOS _before_ the opsys loads, and can
therefore do an end run around it. (Back in DOS days I had problems with
an ISA VGA card: XyWrite would crash or lock up any time I had more than
4 or 5 files open. I was on the phone with TTG about it endlessly, and
they couldn't figure it out either. Then I gut a PCI VGA card, and the
crashes stopped.)
At the software level, I think the occasional crash is probably the
price we have to pay for backward compatibility. If the opsys could
always  we probably
wouldn't be able to run XyWrite. Isn't the fact that it does access the
hardware directly what made it so blazingly fast in the days of 8 MHz
PCs with 64K of RAM?

Patricia M. Godfrey