Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:31:59 -0800 (PST) From: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> To: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, 9ustavo 9onzalez 9iron <gstgnzgr@libertad.univalle.edu.co>, Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> Subject: Re: i286 Message-ID: <XFMail.011211103159.jhb@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <15382.20261.860671.461839@caddis.yogotech.com>
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On 11-Dec-01 Nate Williams wrote: >> > > Exist some kind of FreeBSD's version for intel 286 processor? >> > >> > Never in a million years. There exists no 'real' unix for the 286, >> > since the 286 hardware is incapable of protecting processes well enough >> > to be safe. >> >> Not that anyone cares any more but... i286 provides good >> enough protection -- you can have each prcoess in its own >> protected address space without any external h/w support >> (like we had to do for Moto 68000 based machines). What it >> didn't provide was support for paging. > > As I understand, don't you need paging for 'real' protection to work > right, otherwise you're limited to one/two processes on the box? Well, you have to do swapping to handle virtual memory rather than virtual memory, so it does limit your concurrency. You might be able to play tricks to emulate pages by using multiple selectors but that would be ugly. It would be a bit slow anyways. Go find a 486. :) -- John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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