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SubjectRe: Antw: Re: kill -9 <pid of X>
On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Axel Eble wrote:

> >To ensure system stability, all hardware access has to be confined to
> >device drivers which run in the kernel, so that they are
> >sanity-checked and when a process exits prematurely, it is ensured the
> >hardware state is not left undefined. That's the traditional reasoning
> >and I think it is valid even if a heap of video drivers in the kernel
> >would be as messy as the current heap of network drivers. ;-)
>
> you would need only one driver in the kernel: the text console driver.
> That's enough to get the system into a mode where an install program
> could load the video drivers for the graphics hardware on the system.
> So essentially you would have two video drivers: one for the text mode
> and one for the specific type of crappy PC video card :-)
>
> Am I wrongo there?

No, that's the way KGI does it. You need to be able to display
text (and maybe the Penguin logo) before protected mode is entered, which
means that you need a real-mode driver at the very start of the kernel
boot process. After protected mode is entered, you need a protected mode
driver and the old real-mode boot driver must be thrown away. Given this,
it makes sense to have to boot driver be a stripped-down, specialized
driver. The KGI mini boot driver was only a few K IIRC. All it did was
display 80x25 text and the KGI textual boot logo. A little more code and
it could set a fixed 640x400x4 graphics mode and dump the penguin logo
bitmap to the framebuffer.

Jon

---
'Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in
becoming one with God.'
- Scientist G. Richard Seed


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