Re: Help Wanted!

[Dan Olson <dano@agora.rdrop.com>]

> The big trouble with ELKS is that it only really runs on i86 machines, and
> these are a right pain to deal with --- it's not just that they're really
> old, decrepit machines which cost more in electricity to run than a pocket
> calculator a thousand times more powerful does today, it's that no two are
> the same. Standards were pretty fuzzy in those days, and there's a huge
> variety of different kinds of hardware that needs supporting. Actually making
> ELKS work reliably would be a rather large undertaking just for test
> purposes...

I assume you're talking about PCs based on the 8088/8086, as I'm sure new 
machines could be built using the processor as well.  There were 
standards... but a lot of hardware that came with some sort of DOS driver 
to make it work (CD-ROMs, tape drives, and network cards come to mind).

> (DOS gets away with it because, basically, DOS is crap. It relies on the BIOS
> to do a lot of the work, which ELKS can't really do. Minix manages a bit
> better but it's a bit picky on the kinds of hardware it'll support for just
> this reason.)

I know the BIOS is sometimes lacking for what we're trying to do, but DOS 
isn't crap for reling on it, that's the way the machine was designed, and 
the idea isn't that bad at all, as hardware would have it's own BIOS and 
the OS doesn't need to support everything ever built.  Plus, now we have 
hindsight, I mean, we can choose to support only two or three network 
cards, the most popular hard drive controllers (Don't know how they work 
with the BIOS bypassed), and things of that nature.  If you don't have the 
supported hardware, you'd have to go to eBay and buy it :)

> Can ELKS be ported to *other* architectures that i86? Would it be feasible to
> use it on a modern, flat architecture like ARM?

I suppose at some point it would be easier to start from scratch, but I'm 
sure some porting could be done.

 	Dan