Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 13:35:42 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: terry@lambert.org, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, bde@zeta.org.au, dgy@rtd.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org, helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De Subject: Re: wd driver questions Message-ID: <199703192035.NAA12366@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199703190049.LAA20233@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Mar 19, 97 11:19:47 am
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> There are? We haven't yet established where "the front of the disk" > is yet. It's not safe (or reliable) to try to rewrite the MBR (virus > protection), or the slack space following (some other systems put > bootstraps there). Then the next cylinder might be a partition. Override the virus protection. > DOS can be booted from lots of places; think "network boot", or "floppy disk". > So can FreeBSD; there is no guarantee there at all. In any case, the boot device is known. > > it means no recompilation to support config options, as long as we > > get rid of the static compilation issues in shared code (#if FEATURE > 1) > > and so on. > > This is actually a huge issue; the assumption that devices are > numbered from 0->(NFOO-1) is another wart that I would like to rip. Yes. This should go. So should all configuration options that cause conditional compilation of code rather than conditional inclusion of objects in the link which extend a global linker set. If you get rid of conditional compilation, and leave only conditional inclusion, then you remove the need for recompile on conditional changes, and it becomes a binary/linker issue *only*. This is a *good* thing. > Of those, remembering that this is a program's text file, I can only > see 1) and 3) being any use, ie. the 'readable' bit is pointless. That's the bit. I won't argue utility of microsoft definitions, since I'm not willing to play Devil's advocate for their engineering process, such as it is. > > Yes. The utility of the attributes at boot time is to decide to > > load a particular segment or not. Preload is the most interesting > > attribute in this regard; it should probably be implied on non-pageable > > segments. > > Hmm. The nature of the boot-time linking process would probably imply > that all of the objects in question would have to be loaded, as there > would be no paging mechanism by which unloaded sections could be > loaded until after the system was up, and possibly not even then > (eg. boot from network server, no kernel core locally). They *could* be sparsely loaded. You do not need paged memory management to support partial loading (look at Win3.1 DLL's). > Yeah. And don't get me started on getting technical literature out of > hardware vendors. You have any details on the "Apollo Utility chip" in > the HP9000/4xx machines? 8) No, and I own one of the suckers (yeah, I've seen you on the NetBSD list for the HP300 code). Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199703192035.NAA12366>