From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dan Olson Subject: Re: Help Wanted! Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 13:30:32 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <20050927132303.M61731@agora.rdrop.com> References: <1127539824.8686.33.camel@selene.hsol.net> <00c201c5c393$36d31860$6402a8c0@dionysus> <1a19a18005092712103c1b1c0c@mail.gmail.com> <200509272113.54472.dg@cowlark.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: In-Reply-To: <200509272113.54472.dg@cowlark.com> Sender: linux-8086-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-8086@vger.kernel.org > 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