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Date:      Tue, 4 Apr 95 14:27:20 MET DST
From:      sos@login.dknet.dk (S|ren Schmidt)
To:        roell@informatik.tu-muenchen.de (Thomas Roell)
Cc:        hasty@star-gate.com, terry@cs.weber.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
Subject:   Re: grafx console & DDB
Message-ID:  <9504041227.AA23640@login.dknet.dk>
In-Reply-To: <95Apr4.121110met_dst.42270@papa.informatik.tu-muenchen.de>; from "Thomas Roell" at Apr 4, 95 12:11 pm

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[exellent description of vm86 vs BIOS calls deleted]

> Summararing said, VBE calles under VM86 are not a very good idea. It's only
> usable for dumb framebuffer drivers. And it has serious limitation. What
> I have been thinking of is to simply write a 8086 emulator, so I don't need
> the VM86 handling anymore, which is not implemented everywhere. However this
> would be a major task, and I doubt that it buys you a lot of advantage
> over just writing a driver.
> 
> - Thomas

I have to agree with this picture, but I'm not sure how much a 8086
emu would help you (the BIOS might still be buggy, the BIOS may
not be readable etc etc). There is a 8086 emu floating around
that might serve your purpose, but again I think (as you ) its
not worth it. 
However (getting back to the topic) simply using it in the context 
of bailing out to DDB on panic situations could be usefull, even 
if not all combinations of cards etc would work... 



-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Soren Schmidt  (sos@FreeBSD.org | sos@login.dknet.dk)  FreeBSD Core Team
               So much code to hack -- so little time
..



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