From: obz@sisd.kodak.com (Orest Zborowski COMP) Subject: Re: inb/outb babble.. was Re: Problem with inb and outb.. Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1992 12:59:09 GMT
thoth@uiuc.edu (Ben Cox) writes:
>techs@pioneer.unm.edu (Erik Fichtner) writes:
>
...
>>My friends's goal is to hack the kernel to allow switching between graphics
>>consoles so that he can run X on one console and GeoWorks under the dos
>>emulator. ;-) It'll be a cool hack if it works. so will the port stuff,
>>i think.
>
>It will be more than a "cool hack"...
x386 has this support, but it depends on some flakey sysv386 method of
switching vtcons. linux and x sortof has this support built in, i.e. the
headers are there and the ioctls can be written, but doing the switching
takes a bit more information than i had on hand. if you're interested in
this, let me know and i can fill in some more details.
>
>>Ugh. This is a good idea for devices you KNOW about. like the keyboard,
>>video, serial, parallel, and so forth. but what if the DOS emulator
>>wants to talk to... a Colorado Tape Drive, for instance. That's not
>>something that Linux even understands.... nor do I, or I'd write a kernel
>>patch... Since it's not being used, i see no fault in letting something
>>that understands it deal with it unrestricted.
>
>For ports that Linux doesn't know about, there is no reason not to let
>a process use those ports directly.
>
>You only need to emulate ports that you need to keep the user from
>scrozzling.
right. i'd never run an emulator which allowed unrestrictd access to all
the ports. you'd be sure at the right time some dos program would try to
do some timing detection using the harddisk ports right in the middle of
my latest x compile :-)
>
>--
>Ben Cox
>thoth@uiuc.edu
zorst
[obz@raster.Kodak.COM]
-- zorst (orest zborowski) [obz@raster.Kodak.COM]