[ros-dev] HAL reorganisation

[Steven Edwards]

Hi Alex,

--- Alex Ionescu <ionucu at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Much more then just a BIOS however. Graphics are highly proprietary,
> as 
> is a lot of the PnP. And forget about Legacy I/O. There are other
> subtle 
> details too.

"highly proprietary" is a standard NVidia GeForce Chip minus a VGA
Bios.  VBE works fine on it and we have been in discussion with the
xbox-linux people about how to trick it in to working with the Nvidia
windows binary driver. The Windows driver supports everything from the
old Riva cards up through TNT, GeForce[2,3,4}, etc. All we have to do
is add a few hacks to videoprt.sys, the HAL and a few other places and
it should load according to the research I have done. They have not
done this on Linux already because of lack of resources.

> Some things about it are really tricky. I agree that they should all
> be 
> in a HAL, but unforuntately, IIRC, there still is some arch-specific 
> code in ntoskrnl. In NT4, all the different supported architectures
> had 
> a different kernel...not only a different HAL.

I think there might be a few challenges but I have yet to see anything
yet that would require a new kernel.
 
> There's also the problem with text-mode and the video in general,
> imo.

I think blue.sys will have to be hacked or a new one will have to be
developed but the Linux text mode console works so I dont think it will
take much.

> Easy stuff to fix, and GvG is doing a great job.

Yeah its been great. I can now boot ReactOS, Windows and Linux all from
one master bootloader.

> P.S Much like the Appollo missions brought us so much stuff here at 
> home, I can't wait to see the effects that the xbox port will have.
> USB 
> probably is the coolest.

Yes I hope so as well. If nothing else it will bring more news about
ReactOS which in turn will help us get more developers.

Thanks
Steven



		
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