Using int 13 while BSD is running

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Mar 11), Sergey 'DoubleF' Zaharchenko said:
> > However in dos we have garanteed hard drive support via int13 (Well
> > almost garanteed, but if an os can boot of the computer, we can
> > access the disk),
> 
> The hard disk is not the only device you can boot off. Consider
> floppies, CDROMS, etc. etc. So your access to the disk is only
> guaranteed when you can read the disk, which seems like a tautology
> to me:).
> 
> > and I'm looking for the same sorta garantee in BSD.
> 
> You are stating that the BIOS has better hardware support that
> FreeBSD. Can you give any examples?

I've seen lots of work go into the ata driver recently to support new
ATA and SATA chipsets (take a look at the commits to ata-chipset.c
since its creation just a year ago).  If I were to put a kernel into
some product, I would probably not want to have to keep releasing
updates to it every time SiS, Promise, or Via releases a new chipset.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com