device atpic to be deprecated?

Jung-uk Kim jkim at FreeBSD.org
Mon Apr 3 18:25:01 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 29 March 2006 04:28 am, Scott Long wrote:
> There might have been hope at one time that amd64 would not
> need it.  I beleive that that ioapic is part of the amd64
> system spec that motherboard/chipset makers must implement.

Don't forget we also have EM64T support.  I have a box with Intel CPUs 
and it doesn't work without ATPIC. :-(

> However, engineering inertia is hard to overcome, and it's
> likely that this is just a fantasy.  For i386, it simply has
> no chance of ever going away.  My guess is that it'll take
> a next generation platform to completely do away with ISA,
> ATPIC, and other legacy components.  Hmmm.... maybe that
> next-gen platform is the MacIntel?

That's another issue.  We don't have EFI loader for amd64/i386 and 
amd64/i386 requires BIOS to boot.  Unfortunately we are stuck in the 
middle of transition.

Jung-uk Kim


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