> Absolutely. On Intel, it is (still) Windows the reference. If Windows > doesn't boot on your motherboard you have a problem. So motherboard > vendors won't make crazy incompatible things. They are constrained to OLPC, Moorestown ? > fix their hardware because they just cannot alter Windows to suit their > hardware differences. That really helps keeping actual differences to a > minimum and only to things that are not fundamental. So Windows really > helped making a uniform hardware platform on X86. That and the fact the Microsoft driver validation has driven a lot of standardisation along the "we could write a driver and go through WHQL and ... and ..." or we could just use a standard interface. Thing is though - the x86 platform does change, modern PC systems are very different to old ones (different IRQ controllers, different power management, different processor features, different bus interfaces, different firmware, ...) but someone bothered to make these *discoverable*. If I boot a Linux kernel on an AMD K6 I'm running with an 8259 interrupt controller, 8254/5 supporting I/O, a PC style keyboard controller, graphics via PCI or maybe AGP using memory on the card mostly, a one command at a time ATA interface based on WD1010 registers, APM based firmware that implements an extended version of the PC BIOS. If I boot it on a current PC I'm booting on a multiprocessor system with different timers, totally different IRQ controllers, different keyboard controllers (USB), PCI Express, an IOMMU, NCQ SATA, ACPI, graphics running in shared host memory able to give/take pages from the host, extra instructions, etc etc And the same kernel boots just fine on both just fine. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
