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Date:      Fri, 7 Mar 1997 10:07:34 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        karpen@ocean.campus.luth.se (Mikael Karpberg)
Cc:        ccsanady@nyx.pr.mcs.net, FreeBSD-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: pcvt/132 columns
Message-ID:  <199703071707.KAA16899@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <199703071149.MAA25547@ocean.campus.luth.se> from "Mikael Karpberg" at Mar 7, 97 12:49:34 pm

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[ ... console card specific driver discussion ... ]

> I'm not saying no one has thought of this before, but WHY in gods name,
> not just use THE standard interface? Hard to keep track of all new cards?
> Feeling happy when the driver comes out 1 year after the card is realeased?
> Guess what? The drivers... *drums*  _comes_with_the_cards_ TADA! It's supplied
> by the manufacturers. It's downloadable from their sites. Yes... I'm talking
> Windoze drivers. That's a standard interface for you. One which will allow
> you to use any card with full driver support. That's would be the only thing
> wee needed to implement in the kernel, except for a few drivers for standard
> VGA etc, so that we can the get user booted. Ones you support that driver
> interface, and a loading of such a driver file, it's easy to keep track of all
> cards. With 2D/3D accelleration and anything else you want, fully supported.
> All the user has to do is insert the disk that came with his card and mcopy
> a file into a directory which is scanned at boot time, or something like that.
> 
> This sounds great to me. Where's the problem? Why is this not allready done?


FreeBSD does not support ELF.

FreeBSD does not support segment coloring.

FreeBSD does not support kernel driver init segment discard.

FreeBSD does not provide "INIT level" messages to drivers.

FreeBSD does not support kernel paging of non-page-operation-critical
driver pages.

FreeBSD does not support VM86() services, which some card manufacturers
(like Matrox) use to invoke mode changes.

FreeBSD does not provide the "Ring 0" Windows95/WindowsNT kernel
services that these drivers may call for memory allocation, registry
access for configuration settings, virtual memory management, PnP
interfacing, and device probe response capture, etc..


First step:	Support ELF
Second step:	Support segment coloring of ELF segments using Microsoft
		attributes for paging, etc.
Third step:	Implement coloring based activity, namely kernel virtual
		address space paging.
Fourth step:	Seperate the segments in the linked image, and change
		the kernel loader in the second stage boot to load
		multiple ELF segments to get a single kernel.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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