FreeDOS-32

FreeDOS-32 (or FD32 for short) is a 32-bit operating system under development for the IA-32 (also known as x86) platform and distributed under the terms of the GNU .

Its MultiBoot-compliant, minimal core aims to allow total control and full customization, providing a default protected mode environment as simple as possible; without memory protection, paging, multitasking or even file systems. Features can be added by loading appropriate modules or drivers.

It is intended to be a good choice of environment for running DOS Protected Mode Interface applications, and also for developing embedded systems based on low-cost, x86 motherboards.

Goals
The separate FreeDOS project aims for full compatibility with MS-DOS, and, as such, no further improvements to the DOS architecture are planned.

The FreeDOS-32 project has a complementary goal; to provide a heavily modularized framework to enable features that legacy DOS systems do not have, such as a 32-bit, flat memory-model, optimized Input/Output, support for many file systems, compatibility layers and support for modern standards, amongst others. Although this may put limitations on compatibility with legacy DOS, this is a secondary issue.

FreeDOS-32 does not necessarily have to be a 'DOS system', as the resulting environment depends on the modules loaded on top of a very general minimal core. It can be started from a real mode DOS, such as FreeDOS; much like how Windows 3.1 could be started from DOS. In this way, the user can run FreeDOS when a highly MS-DOS compatible operating system is needed, switch to FreeDOS-32 to use its different features, and return to the FreeDOS session when done.

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