*BSD News Article 12467


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!caen!batcomputer!cornell!rochester!rit!isc-newsserver!psinntp!psinntp!uuneo!sugar!peter
From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: 386/486 motherboard ROM BIOS & 386BSD ( was Re: [REPOST] FDC DRIVER )
Organization: NeoSoft Communications Services -- (713) 684-5900
Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1993 18:16:18 GMT
Message-ID: <C3Mw38.AD0@sugar.neosoft.com>
Keywords: FDC floppy device driver dependencies
References: <1993Mar4.103308.24945@marie.uucp> <C3E4nx.60o@sugar.neosoft.com> <1993Mar9.080706.14422@netcom.com>
Lines: 30

In article <1993Mar9.080706.14422@netcom.com> pascal@netcom.com (Richard Childers) writes:
> peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
> >perryh@marie.uucp (Perry Hutchison) writes:
> >> Not to my knowledge, one factor being that most machines' ROM BIOS will
> >> only support two hard drives (that being the maximum number ever blessed
> >> by Big Blue); and even if a particular BIOS would take more than two I
> >> don't know that stock DOS would cooperate.

> >That wouldn't stop UNIX or PICK or Netware from taking advantage of them.

> Am I correct in understanding that 386BSD does _not_ use on-board BIOS ?

No modern operating system for the IBM-PC with any interest in getting
decent performance out of the hardware uses the on-board BIOS once it has
booted and determined what devices are online.

> And
> if so, does this imply that there is a market for BIOS-less 386/486 mother-
> -boards ?

Not unless you've got some other way of loading the initial boot image.

> It would be nice to not have a dependency upon BIOS, for numerous reasons.

Yep, it sure is.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>.
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  'U`    
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