Thanks Megatron 0,
I'm always open to a little light Summer reading.
Title of the Intel manuals that I downloaded;
1) "Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual, Volume 1: Basic Architecture"
2) "Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual Volume 2 (2A, 2B, 2C & 2D): Instruction Set Reference, A-Z"
[Edit: the above are an incomplete set, find the full compilation file under
https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/699529#combined]
Seriously, I'm a bit intimidated by those files.
An interesting note between the OSDev version and Blundell's (I haven't gotten into his 32 bit version yet);
The real-mode code Blundell provides seems to run at full tilt, eating up 100% of one of my cores.
The "Meaty Skeleton" version only appears to sip at it when running on qemu. (Indicating that we are in a NOP state?)
[Edit:
It's because the hlt statement in their boot.s file. They even go a couple steps further in that even though interupts are turned off, if we were to get interupts to work again, it just makes us jump to just above the hlt statement. I was hoping it was inside of the C code... ]