Drivers as files

[Robb Bates]

I'm curious if there would be any benefit, or if it's even possible/practical to have all the hardware drivers as files that get loaded during boot instead of being compiled and flashed to the ROM.

I mean, you'd have to have the disk driver/bios in ROM to load them from disk in the first place, but everything else could in theory be on the disk.

I mean modern computers have a hardware BIOS for some of the very low level stuff, but all the sound card, graphics, network and what-not are all loaded from disk after boot.  So why couldn't we do that?

I'm likely missing something obvious.  It's probably possible, just not very useful or practical or efficient for memory.

Just a shower thought... not an actual desire to do things this way.

Robb

[Alan Cox]

CP/M BIOSes can do this. The Amstrad PCW being the obvious mass market system with loadable drivers. ROMWBW is kind of an odd approach because back in the day ROM cost real money and in volume would be mask ROM so incredibly expensive to change. Many machines therefore had little more than 'go bong and load disk sector 0' in ROM in CP/M days.

Alan

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[Wayne Warthen]

Certainly possible.  With respect to RomWBW, it would be a major effort and not something I am in a position to work on.

Thanks, Wayne