vkernel & GSoC, some questions

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Peter Jeremy wrote:

>>    with the BIOS, and see BIOSes then respec to a new far cleaner API. 
>> The
>>    BIOS is the stinking pile of horseshit that has held back OS development
>>    for the last 15 years.
>
> I'd go further and say that BIOSes are getting worse: Back in the AT-clone 
> days, you could just totally ignore the BIOS once you'd gotten the kernel 
> loaded.  Now you _have_ to keep talking to the BIOS for things like ACPI - 
> but the BIOSes are still just as broken as they used to be.

On Sun's Niagara (sun4v) platform, it is expected that all OS's will sit on 
top of the hypervisor that ships in the firmware, abstracting away countless 
basic hardware services behind hypercalls.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge