Re: ISA slot detection on PCI systems?

Charles Cazabon
2002-01-04T21:05:04Z

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:
> Dave Jones <davej@suse.de>:
> > Indeed. Something I'm trying to convey to Eric, but I don't think
> > he realises just how many pooched BIOSen there are out there.
> > His conservative estimate of '150 entries in the blacklist'
> > is possibly off by an order of 10 times or more.
>
> Are there even 1500 distinct PC motherboard designs in *existence*? :-)

There are tens of thousands of distinct PC motherboard designs in existence.
I've personally worked on more than a thousand of them over the years. The
big issue is that even with a single distinct design (say a reference design
used by multiple manufacturers), there will be multiple differently-buggy
BIOSen for that board before you even consider the different versions a single
manufacturer will crank out over time.

The motherboard market is a lot less diverse today than it was at its peak --
say late-486 through mid-Pentium (94-97 perhaps). At one point, there were a
dozen major brands of core logic, and hundreds of motherboard manufacturers.

Of course, DMI doesn't come into much of the older ones.

Charles
--
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Charles Cazabon <linux@discworld.dyndns.org>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
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