It's often useful to be able to make real-mode x86 BIOS calls from userland.
Linux lrmi provides a simple interface to this for i386 machines, but this
doesn't help on other platforms.  libx86 provides the Linux lrmi interface,
but will also run on platforms such as amd64 and alpha.

WWW: http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/libx86/