> Given that most OS mailing lists/forums seem to be dominated with hardware > problems my basic question is does OpenBSD have a fallback option to just use > BIOS routines to get hardware working if even slower than feasible but at > least working?
No. > And if not why not? Because the kernel cannot know what memory it should leave untouched, to use such BIOS functions. Also, BIOS functions are traditionally coded only powerful enough bootup style operation. Their primitives simply are not powerful enough to match the concurrency, locking, memory mapping, etc needs of the kernel. Especially the concurrency - most use poll-style operations. Nothing else would happen at the same time. Finally, because BIOS on all platforms are full of history and BUGS. We'd rather jump off a cliff.
