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Date:      Mon, 6 Jan 1997 16:32:56 +1030 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu (Bill Paul)
Cc:        jb@cimlogic.com.au, current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: kernel w/o source? [MOD_DECL in lkm.h]
Message-ID:  <199701060602.QAA29343@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <199701051901.OAA18285@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> from Bill Paul at "Jan 5, 97 02:01:56 pm"

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Bill Paul stands accused of saying:
> 
> That said, what would make this problem (and probably some others) go
> away is a BIOS-based disk driver, but we've discussed this already and
> the problems involved in doing something like this haven't yet been
> solved. (Talked about to death, yes, but not solved.) Getting the kernel
> to switch to real mode to use the BIOS and then back again is tantamount
> to turning lead into gold, and nobody seems to be in a hurry to implement
> vm86 support. (Then again, I'm not even sure that vm86 mode alone is
> enough to do it.)

Do I need to beat the "why we have no vm86 support yet" gong again?  If
anyone thinks it'll help, I will 8)

Yes, we could do a BIOS disk driver.  I don't know whether it would
actually require vm86 support (which is for running user processes,
not kernel code), but it would be a shade hairy.  Certainly it would
be easiest to run it in a user process.

> That said, I'm sure that some people wouldn't mind having an 'object-mostly'
> kernel distribution in addition to the full source distribution. That way 

Or even just a means to construct such a distribution.

> -Bill Paul            (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@gsoft.com.au             [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@gsoft.com.au            [[
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