Re: DragonFly on a Intel G965 Mainboard

[Markus Hitter <mah@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 14.11.2006 um 08:48 schrieb Joerg Sonnenberger:

> On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 06:30:45PM +0100, Markus Hitter wrote:
> > Still I think an option to run DragonFly off BIOS drivers would be a
> > good thing. Hardware changes every few months and if the bootloader
> > works, why shouldn't the remaining OS? Performance is a secondary  
> > issue.
>
> The performance would be completely unusable.

While the performance would suffer for sure, it would be the only  
option to run DragonFly on not-yet-supported hardware. Gentoo  
features such an option, lets you boot all up into Gnome and  
performance is reasonable for viewing documents, compiling drivers or  
even editing OpenOffice stuff. You get something like 1 MB/s disk  
throughput at full processor speed.

For the records, Gergo asked me to switch off "Plug & Play support",  
but recent BIOSs for this Intel board (and likely all other current  
Intel boards) don't feature such an option. Luckily, I got DFly  
installed with Qemu 0.8.2 yesterday, running on top of Windows 2000.

Next step would be to get an development environment up, but any  
suggestions are welcome.


> Even the loader already has to jump through a few loops to use
> the BIOS -- you certainly don't want to do that for the normal system.

How about jumping three steps into the future and to use EFI drivers?  
From what I read on osx86.org, Intel offers an EFI emulator for BIOS  
systems and EFI is capable enough to allow OS-provided device drivers.


Markus

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/