From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <4663D422.9000301@conducive.org> Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2007 04:58:10 -0400 From: W B Hacker User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070221 SeaMonkey/1.1.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] fossil crash after installation References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 77f0176e-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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