On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 12:31:28AM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > I wonder, if Fuzix is sufficiently portable to run on 8086, could it > > happen to offer a possibly even more suitable foundation for a usable > > system, than the linux-derived code in ELKS? > > I'm not sure where the changeover point would be. ELKS supports > asynchronous disk I/O properly, something FUZIX avoids. On an 8bit micro > its pretty much pure overhead. On a PC/XT it's less clear. My experience with again Venix/86: it came with an async XT hard disk driver. Unfortunately this did not work with differing hd controllers, not all computers were born equal enough. Replacing the hd driver with a home made bios based one did not produce any "noticeable" performance impact (i.e. never measured but never bothered). There was not that much of parallelizable i/o and the CPU/RAM was often the bottleneck. This can be different on faster reimplementations of *86 but the disks are now faster as well. > ELKS is not that bloated to be honest. It's got a few areas that would > probably save a chunk of memory if fixed but the basic architecture is > pretty sound including basic 286 mode support. Nice! I had an impression that it was severely constrained by the 64k limit for itself, which would make it very hard to extend the functionality. Of course a part of the problem is the compiler efficiency limitations. > Some of the utilities are a bit brain-dead or buggy and might benefit > from being pulled from elsewhere instead, and there are things lacking > (like the real bourne shell should fit fine and is nowdays available) Sure. Fortunately the user space is much easier to replace. Rl -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-8086" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html