Owa, owa, as far I understand since the PC was born in 80's is that the
different hardware configurations were possible since the common
interface in software, named "BIOS" does the compatibility between
different hardware and software, through a common structured system.
Video cards just =need= their own BIOS to deal with different hardware
configurations and processors, how Linux understand how to deal with
that?  I use to program in assembler, and in physical hardware
addressing when speed is required, but it is tooooooo risky, mainly for
video.

So, if Linux can deal with deep 24 bits video cards without use their
BIOS I really need to applause Linux development people... how many
video cards we have with different hardware we have actually in the
market???



"Dr. Imre Bartfai" wrote:
>
> On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, Wagner Lipnharski wrote:
>
> > Well, this is something that bothers me... for sure I understand that a
> > different platform works in a complete different way... organization,
> > task control, and lots of other things, but, still running 80x86 code,
> > the same PC BIOS, I/O, Video, Disk, and so on, it means that basically a
>            ^^^^^^^  FALSE!
> IMHO Linux avoids the whole BIOS and all their device drivers operate on
> hardware (i. e. port) level.
>
> > "normal" DOS program should run under Unix (Linux), and even part of any
> > Windows program... at least the "executable" part of the code, while the
> > "transition" and other control areas would crash because the platform
> > differences...  If this is correct, it is not too difficult to convert a
> > pure DOS program to Unix...
> [ snip]
>
> Imre