[rescue] Compaq Proliant 8000

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Nick wrote:

> Question for you, does AMD Opteron count as "x86"?

IMO, a machine's degree of x86ness is determined by:

  1) It has a CPU that implements the IA32 instruction set.
  2) It has a "BIOS" with a "setup" program and not interactive firmware
     that lets you run diagnostics and such.
  3) It gets its device tree by either peeking and poking "known
     locations" in the memory map or just assuming that certain non-core
     devices (like serial ports, video, disk controllers) will just
     happen to be mapped to certain addresses in I/O space.  This is, of
     course, opposed to a proper FULL PCI probe.
  4) It expects the boot sector of the boot device (which must be a
     disk) to follow the old broken PC-DOS INT 13h semantics.
  5) Component quality (obviously a nebulous qualification).

It's entirely possible to build non-PCs with 80386 processors.  It's
also possible to build near-PCs with other processors.  I think it's
fair to say that we all know what each other is talking about, though,
and there's no need to be difficult.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Being on the Internet is not the same as being
Elgin, TX         (   famous.  That's like calling Cheetos 'dinner'."
USA                )                                    --Metal Steve