Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> the one thing about minority platforms though ... I've been working with
> these all my life I think. Starting with Unix. So the "minority platform"
> argument is one that I don't like that much.

The minority platform argument is only good enough to say we won't get
all drivers for free.  Beyond that I agree it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Beyond that.  A tenative design:

A standalone static application, that can either:
- Run directly on raw hardware.
- Run on top of an OS just to use it's drivers.
  Running hosted on an OS shouldn't be hard with a good abstraction
  layer, which we need for flexibility anyway.

Which means that a UDP/IP stack at least must reside in the app.

I need to do some serious investigation but this looks like the best
approximation I currently see.  Using the Linux kernel or plan9 appear
to promising to drop.  But at the same time I haven't seen a tradeoff
free version of those.  And being able to fit an entire BIOS into 64K
is extremely attractive.

Are there any more hardware/features it looks like we need to support?
Ignoring the implementation details.

Eric

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