ISA Device Controllers
To support common ISA devices, 386BSD must cope with a separate I/O address bus, shared memory, vectored interrupts, and dedicated DMA controllers. Since most of these evolved from ad hoc standards, device conflicts are common. In order to accurately support ISA, we began with a minimal AT 386 configuration -- 386/387, 1-Mbyte RAM, keyboard, monitor, Winchester drive (ST506, ESDI, IDE), and floppy drive -- and relied solely on what the BIOS uses to work the hardware. We expect an improvement in performance when these guidelines are eventually relaxed.
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