New bus-unit wiring via hints..

[Ed Schouten]

* Bill Vermillion <bv at wjv.com> wrote:
> Hmm.  I started running Xenix systems on Intel systems [SCO's
> Xenix, and Altos systems] back in the 1984 era.
> 
> At that time as I recall it the BIOS was ONLY used to get
> the information to boot the system, and everything else in the BIOS
> was ignored.  This caused a lot of confusion for people who had
> come from a DOS oriented world and saying things such as "well it
> works in DOS so *i*x must be broken.
> 
> So - have things changed where the OS looks at the BIOS [in the
> *i*x world - or is it like this old fart remembers where BIOS was
> only used to find the HD and boot the OS?

A good example is FreeBSD on the Microsoft Xbox. The Xbox has no
PC-style BIOS and yet it's capable of running a (slightly patched)
FreeBSD kernel. A disadvantage of the Xbox is that it doesn't have a VGA
BIOS interface, which means the port uses a custom framebuffer driver to
make the console work.

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at fxq.nl>
 WWW: http://g-rave.nl/
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