Jeff Bond wrote:
> There seems to be a lot of discussion about making plex86 accurately
> model the PC architecture, including ISA, PCI, AGP, chipsets etc. My
> question is is this really necessary? For example, why bother providing
> AGP support in plex86? Just because it's faster in a real PC does not
> mean it'll be faster in plex86. Don't forget that you might be able to
> 'cheat', since you are not constrained by clock speeds, bus contention
> etc. Another example, a real hardware bus is a shared resource, but a
> modelled bus can be implemented as a large crossbar switch that never
> has contention.
Yes I agree with all of this. The only thing we need to be interested
in is modeling the behaviour of software from a software perspective.
So when an OS probes or uses hardware, it sees the data as it would
on a real machine. We don't care how bus signaling works etc.
We would have to implement the configuration space stuff, for example.
AGP. There is no real motivation to implement this. Though it's
essentially just another PCI bus from our perspective.
The simplest way to say it, is that we have to model only what
we have to model. That's the same for the entire program.
-Kevin
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Kevin Lawton [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MandrakeSoft, Inc. Plex86 developer
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/ http://www.plex86.org/
