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.

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.

Cheers, Steve