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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>. `-_-' Oletko halannut suttasi tänään? 'U` Tarjoilija, tämä ateria elää vielä.