From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <4394AAFF.50207@lanl.gov> Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 14:02:55 -0700 From: Ronald G Minnich User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7-1.1.fc4 (X11/20050929) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] replacing 9load References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: b83fc898-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Russ Cox wrote: > - write vm86 code for the kernel to replace the realmode > code. vm86 code should be safer and more reliable > and will make the vesa and apm code run on more machines. a thought here. We've been looking at the vga path for a few years, in the linuxbios project, and in fact precede the current plan 9 learning curve on vga by a bit. In 2001 I wrote the equivalent of the Plan 9 realmode code for linuxbios, and put it in; it did pretty much the equivalent of what the realmode driver does now, and it worked, but it is really risky at times. Why? because the things that those VGA bios guys do are really evil. I can tell you stories ... too ugly to discuss in a family publication like 9fans. I'm very impressed that it is working so well. I would ask people to consider looking at what we finally had to do in linuxbios, which is to put an x86 emulator. derived from the X11 x86 emulator, into a driver. This works really well. You can catch evil things that the vga bios tries to do, and make them less evil. Also, such a driver would go in port/, not pc/. Just a thought. But, long term, the approach of replacing 9load with plan9 sure makes a lot of sense. Is it possible some day that 9fat could go away, and we just load a kernel off of fossil? Just wondering. ron