From: W B Hacker <wbh@conducive.org>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] fossil crash after installation
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2007 04:58:10 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4663D422.9000301@conducive.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <cfb2d732cc5d0a4fd955720e3e9f9946@terzarima.net>
Charles Forsyth wrote:
>> you must remember that dma is remarkable technology
>> newly devised for the PC platform, and it has been understandably
>> hard to get it just right.
>
> obviously i refer to the hardware interfaces.
> if it weren't new and difficult, IDE/ATA/SATA (... get this right yet!) drive
> interfaces would all be the same and all work, wouldn't they?
> there can't be any other possible explanation.
> it's not like VGA where all the interfaces are simple and the same ...
> just a moment ... oh, no! that's all different and differently buggy as well.
> i wonder how to sack an entire industry.
>
T'was once both simpler and more obvious wherein the limitations were to be found.
Software - or more specifically, 'firmware' - not hardware.
At least once designers got their collective arms well and truly around clock
distribution, gate-delay, and timing issues in general - most of which were in
the 'long ago solved' category once legacy ISA-bus stuff - IDE in particular -
moved into a ~bridge' chipset.
Unfortunately, today's 'solution' to marginal silicon or PCB implementations
seems to be to program around it with bespoke BIOS / driver kludges that may
satisfy one OS but not another.
> (have you seen USB-to-Go?)
>
>
Not sure I want to...
;-)
Bill
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2007-06-04 8:58 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2007-06-04 7:26 Antonin Vecera
2007-06-04 7:35 ` Steve Simon
2007-06-04 7:59 ` Charles Forsyth
2007-06-04 8:13 ` W B Hacker
2007-06-04 8:55 ` Charles Forsyth
2007-06-04 8:27 ` Charles Forsyth
2007-06-04 8:58 ` W B Hacker [this message]
2007-06-04 8:55 ` Antonin Vecera
2007-06-04 9:32 ` Antonin Vecera
2007-06-04 11:45 ` erik quanstrom
2007-06-04 15:10 ` Russ Cox
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