On 02/09/2010 03:36 PM, Natalia Portillo wrote:
Xenix is currently working (when copied from real hardware).
As well Interactive UNIX and some other non-DOS from 8086 and 286 era.
I'm not really sure that operating systems (specially the 8086 ones
that do mmu functions in software) will be happy with the PCI bus
present.
Same for first 386 operating systems (OS/2 2, UNIX, Xenix, so on).
I don't think it is so bad forking the BIOS, letting the ISA one only
for bug fixes, and the PCI one for new features.
Even the ISA BIOS can be code cleaned, there is no SMBIOS or ACPI in
ISA hardware.
I doubt anyone is going to want to actually maintain an ISA BIOS solely
to support these OSes.
But at any rate, I'd like to see someone actually confirm that something
works with isapc and not with pc.
Or, use bochs bios, that we know is working (at least for now) for
isapc, and seabios for pcipc.
There are a lot of ways to do that, but I think that simply forgetting
about isapc and deleting it is not a bugfix, but a big big bug.
If nothing actually requires isapc, then I don't see how removing it is
a bug. Heck, if we just alias isapc to pc, then I doubt anyone would
actually notice :-)
Regards,
ANthony Liguori
