Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 17:48:09 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: imp@village.org (Warner Losh) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PnP BIOS Message-ID: <199806101748.KAA29713@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199806101629.KAA04002@harmony.village.org> from "Warner Losh" at Jun 10, 98 10:29:17 am
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> for a variety of reasons, I'd like to be able to call the PnP > BIOS that is on my machine. I notice that the kernel currently > searches for the $PnP magic cookie, but just prints it on boot. It > doesn't even bother to save it away like the SMBIOStable and the > DMItable. Has anybody done any work in this area realting to calling > PnP BIOS functions from a running system? Reading the PnP MindShare > book leads me to believe that this should be fairly simple and easy to > do (barring implementation bugs in the BIOS) once you have the "weird" > segmentation addressing issues taken care of which the MindShare books > seems to imply that you need to do. (I don't have the book in front > of me, so it might not be weird but just different...). To solve the BIOS calling issue if you need non-INT-based BIOS calls, you should examine a different MindShare book: Protected Mode Software Architecture MindShare, Inc. PC System Architecture Series Tom Shanley ISBN: 0-201-55447-X Yes, *that* Tom Shanley. It discusses all of the issues necessary to implement a VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) for 386 emulation, including all the necessary data to implement using the VM86 bit for virtual interrupt processing. This is basically enough information that, were it implemented, you *should* be able to boot FreeBSD or Linux -- under FreeBSD. And because of the use of a VMM rather than processor emulation, as under BOCHS -- run nearly full speed. Think of it as "the perfect Linux emulation"... 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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