HEADS UP: Dropping ISA & EISA support

Eugene dfuser at medcom.com.ua
Fri Jan 9 07:24:14 PST 2009


Hello.

Sascha Wildner wrote:
David Rhodus schrieb:
I'm curious how the vga driver will be affected.
I have a few old systems still in production that run console only 
that use ISA video cards.
The vga driver is a special case and would remain unchanged for now (it 
initializes very very early through the backdoor and then attaches to 
the isa bus even for PCI cards).
Another question I have is how the system will behave on old ISA-based 
chipsets, like i430 or i440 and some chipsets heaving an ISA-bus (some 
versions of i815 boards have the slot, while nothing was ever plugged in 
it)?
A bad example of Linux kernels on non-MMX processors (unconditionally 
halts on any non-MMX CPU, like Cyrix 150+) is the thing I really fear of.

Really it would be good to have some patch with a possibility to 
integrate it with a kernel rebuild process to the system to support ISA 
cards if it becomes necessary.

Sorry for my poor English.
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