On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 08:44:28 GMT, Steve Woodford wrote:
> On Monday 10 January 2005 00:50, Jesse Off wrote:
> 
> > It definitely would be cute to have a x86 real-mode emulator in the
> > kernel, but I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to implement it.  :-)
> 
> I looked into this a while ago, using the x86 emulator in XFree86, to the 
> point where I was able to build it into a kernel (though I stopped working on
>  
> it before it was fully functional).
> 
> I concluded that it really wasn't worth the extra kernel bloat (around 1.5MB 
> IIRC) considering the code would be used exactly once at boot time. This 
> functionality really does belong in firmware IMO.
> 
That wouldn't matter if we could reclaim the memory after it had been used 
as some other OSen can do.... :-(

> Having said that, it would be nice to be able to defer VGA attachment until 
> userland is running. That way, the emulator could be run within a user 
> process, with vga(4) attaching afterwards.

Any reason why we can't?  We can attach scsi busses and other types of 
peripheral dynamically.

R.