> After studying lots of specs and testing it on several motherboards, it
> seems that those bits are implemented almost everywhere and hard-wired to zeroes
> on the remaining MB's. We probably should honor them and report the reason
> to the user if we find any.
>
Well, I have very little faith in motherboard manufacturers and BIOS writers, so
I wouldn't believe anything I didn't set myself.
> > This is really an issue about where hardware initialization should occur. The
> > real-mode setup.S seems to be the intended place to do this sort of thing, but
> > very few people like writing assembler code so it tends to clutter up the kernel
> > proper. I have a few ideas about this. Maybe something will happen in a few
> > weeks.
>
> We probably don't have any hardware to be initialized as we must not touch
> the enables (see the previous discussion).
>
> Martin
Again, this depends on how much trust you have in the hardware setup.
John