Hi Alex,
--- Alex Ionescu ionucu@videotron.ca wrote:
Much more then just a BIOS however. Graphics are highly proprietary, as is a lot of the PnP. And forget about Legacy I/O. There are other subtle details too.
"highly proprietary" is a standard NVidia GeForce Chip minus a VGA Bios. VBE works fine on it and we have been in discussion with the xbox-linux people about how to trick it in to working with the Nvidia windows binary driver. The Windows driver supports everything from the old Riva cards up through TNT, GeForce[2,3,4}, etc. All we have to do is add a few hacks to videoprt.sys, the HAL and a few other places and it should load according to the research I have done. They have not done this on Linux already because of lack of resources.
Some things about it are really tricky. I agree that they should all be in a HAL, but unforuntately, IIRC, there still is some arch-specific code in ntoskrnl. In NT4, all the different supported architectures had a different kernel...not only a different HAL.
I think there might be a few challenges but I have yet to see anything yet that would require a new kernel.
There's also the problem with text-mode and the video in general, imo.
I think blue.sys will have to be hacked or a new one will have to be developed but the Linux text mode console works so I dont think it will take much.
Easy stuff to fix, and GvG is doing a great job.
Yeah its been great. I can now boot ReactOS, Windows and Linux all from one master bootloader.
P.S Much like the Appollo missions brought us so much stuff here at home, I can't wait to see the effects that the xbox port will have. USB probably is the coolest.
Yes I hope so as well. If nothing else it will bring more news about ReactOS which in turn will help us get more developers.
Thanks Steven
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