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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.misc:2388 comp.os.linux.misc:13527 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!foxhound.dsto.gov.au!fang.dsto.gov.au!yoyo.aarnet.edu.au!news.adelaide.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!zip.eecs.umich.edu!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!gatech!news.byu.edu!cwis.isu.edu!u.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: Impressions: FreeBSD vs Linux Date: 25 Apr 1994 05:16:02 GMT Organization: Weber State University, Ogden, UT Lines: 31 Message-ID: <2pfjmi$3j9@u.cc.utah.edu> References: <hastyCo5p59.MvK@netcom.com> <2p72cm$278@eve.adam.com.au> <2p6jqn$9b2@acme.gatech.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.weber.edu In article <2p6jqn$9b2@acme.gatech.edu> gt8134b@prism.gatech.edu (Robert Sanders) writes: ]steve@adam.com.au (Stephen White) writes: ] ]>You wanted a DOS emulator to initialise SVGA cards? ]>Like, the startup script for X would have "dosemu -c INITSVGA.EXE" in it? ]>Your middle name isn't "Othmar" by any chance? ] ]No, what he's saying isn't ridiculous at all. Having a way to run the ]vendor-supplied VGA BIOS to initialize the cards with proprietary and ]undocumented (or only documented with an NDA) hardware would be a good ]thing for many people. It's still a good idea, but I don't have the ]time or need or desire to work on it, and everyone else knows better. Actually, a better plan is a protected mode vm86() call so anything anyone wants to write in kernel space could make a BIOS call if it needed one. Then per card drivers using a hardware abstraction layer and moving most of DDX into the kernel -- with the drivers loaded over top of a generic driver using loaded kernel modules. Depending on DOS as a loader for a DOS program that *can* be written under BSD or Linux is plain silly... it's just another reason to not mkfs all your DOS disks. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.