7 Dec
2005
7 Dec
'05
6:38 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 12/7/2005 at 10:11 AM Gil Carrick wrote:
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I can understand MS wanting to deprecate a lot of the PC legacy features.
NT startup has to be one of the more complex computing tasks around and I
suspect that the folks in Redmond have envied Apple for a long time in not
having to accomodate all sorts of bizarre departures from the norm in
hardware. All of which has me wondering how much longer things like
8237-type-DMA will be part of the PC platform.
Cheers,
Chuck
I'd say one of the misfeatures of PC is legacy. At some point despite the pain
some artifacts of XT or even AT hardware needed to disappear as real. In an age
of small ram being 256MB a DMA chip that can't address more than 65k is a
bottleneck. Especially when you consider the size of page files, swapfiles
and program size in general. If you doing a 32bit system then a 32bit DMA
is required.
Then once you have blistering performance from the hardware the software must
use it. Then you can emulate/simulate older legacy stuff in a way that is
not hurting system performance inside the OS.
Allison