From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 16:21:24 -0500 From: Russ Cox To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] replacing 9load In-Reply-To: <4394AAFF.50207@lanl.gov> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline References: <4394AAFF.50207@lanl.gov> Topicbox-Message-UUID: b855fda2-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > 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. This is way more code than doing vm86, though vm86 is gone on amd64, so maybe it's necessary. I tried doing this years ago with a home-grown x86 simulator, and it didn't seem to run fast enough to appease the hardware. > 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. Sure. That could happen today if someone wrote the fossil and venti parsing code for 9load. Russ