From: iiitac@swan.pyr (Alan Cox) Subject: Re: Why linux needs an INT 13h disk driver Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1993 16:13:22 GMT
In article <21gt3l$81n@news.u.washington.edu> tzs@stein2.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) writes:
>Someone should write an INT 13h disk driver for linux. That would be
>a disk driver that uses the BIOS INT 13h function for all disk access.
>There are two ways this could be done:
This is not viable. For many drivers you can't do this because they
assume bits of free DOS memory and often use other BIOS calls or
the timers. The OS/2 INT 13 handler is a work of art mostly possible
because of the MS-DOS support in the system
>
>I work in the SCSI industry, on the controller side of things (I write
>SCSI BIOS firmware). From what I've seen, a lot of PC manufacturers are
>going to be moving away from IDE and to SCSI for hard disk support. This
>will be done by putting SCSI chips on the motherboard and providing BIOS
>support.
Given the coming of NT, Solaris, etc thats pretty silly and I'd be suprised.
Also most SCSI manufacturers are ambivalent or helpful to developers. What
would be far better is if someone (here is your chance) added a small set
of 386 mode calls to the SCSI bios and declared a standard for it that
people could write ONE driver for each OS to drive. If you've done most
of the 8086 code the 386 extras wouldn't be hard would they.
Alan