Firstly, because it is nice to have this handled via a device file in
/dev; I don't know of a way to pass ioctls to user-space drivers. Using
/dev allows the driver to emulate /dev/fb and therefore get software support
(e.g. an X server) without having to rewrite the software.
Secondly, because when I started I didn't believe it was possible in
user space (clearly I've been proven wrong (-: ). The fact that Linux
preserves page 0 helps - I didn't know that before.
> > So far no one has offered me an easier way to do it (though one person
> > did suggest I should run it in protected mode in a 16-bit code segment -
> > doesn't sound to me like that would work too well...).
> This wont work because the BIOS will be doing real mode specific
> segment arithmetic and stuff that simply wont work in 16-bit
> protected mode.
Well, if the only thing it does with segments is to load 0x40 into a segment
register this can easily be dealt with by creating a valid segment with this
descriptor (in fact I think it's already been done for the APM code in 2.1).
imc
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