Re: PnP support?

[Randy Heineke <heineke@vanilla.r.umn.edu>]

On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Jeffrey wrote:

> I remember asking about protected mode in relation
> to video cards. The kernel does start out in real mode
> before switching to protected mode. It seems it would be
> easy to do something before that switch. What is the
> kernel developers and Linus's opinion on the matter?
>                                       -Jeff 

Sorry Jeff If I did not get back to you sooner. Was out of town a couple
of days and had to do taxes.  

I think you have a good question.  I do not know how much time these guys
have for these questions.  So for now I would like to play safe and
assume that they don't have much time.  I am sure that if they had time
there discussions would be most illuminating.  On the other hand I have
recieved RTM messages on a few occasions. 

To answer your question, I am afraid to ask at this time. At first I
thought that they might say no way, just because I didn't ask the
question properly.  But what really holds me back is I have no idea what
we would or could do if some one said yes.  So maybe its time to
postulate a little more about what we could hope to accomplish with
gathering data in the unprotected mode. 

1. Say we can interrogate hardware.  Do we know what addresses to peek
   into?

2. Are some registers unavailable with out violating the no-write rule?

3. Can we obtain a complete hardware picture?

4. What mechanism can interpret this information?

If we cannot answer these then I do not know what question(s) to ask.


Regards,