This entire week I have been streaming my experiments with setting up 16-bit protected mode on 80286 from ground up. You can view the recordings of these sessions on YouTube.

Turns out 16-bit protected mode has been a rabbit hole for me. There are so many features of protected mode that are not used anymore in the world of 386+ and flat virtual addressing spaces, but are worth exploring even if out of curiosity. And I am myself curious to pursue them all!

Therefore next week I'm going to continue with 286 stuff. I think I should say something about instructions like ARPL, LSL, LAR, VERR and VERW - they all make perfect sense in an environment like the one I have set up during these streams, while they are rarely if ever used in later architectures. So this is a perfect opportunity to show them in a place where they are really useful for a change.

And then we can also try some task switching - we have most of the building blocks prepared already.

Finally, I also had planned to program PIC and enable some IRQs, because this example program feels a bit too "static". I may end up re-creating what I have in my old long mode examples, but perhaps I may end up making something fancier. When I'm not making silly mistakes, it all progresses quite nicely.

Also, I'm attaching the complete source code made on stream this week.