🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <By2qA1.5z3.2@cs.cmu.edu> lindsay+@cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay)  
writes:
[Discussing Alpha PALcode.]
> The upside here is that the Alpha could (for example) avoid the
> strange situation of the 386 power management modes. What's happening
> is that vendors are adding (incompatible!) features which have to be
> controlled by some sort of code, and yet the features are supposed to
> be completely invisible to the OS. Say what? 
> 
> A portable with an Alpha would do power management from PALcode, and
> there would be some effort to keep each PALcode/OS interface
> unchanged.
> 
1) The 386 has all the features necessary to implement software abstraction  
to handle this situation. If these vendors agreed on the interface and cast  
it into ROM, life would be good.
2) If there were five highly competitive companies implementing low-power  
Alpha chips and they all defined different PALcode interfaces you'd have  
exactly the same problem.

So, where's the beef?
--
Zalman Stern		   zalman@adobe.com		    (415) 962 3824
Adobe Systems, 1585 Charleston Rd., POB 7900, Mountain View, CA 94039-7900
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