[Coco] Boot flexibility in OS-9

[Benoit Bleau]

> 
> 	Any chance of getting a modular kernel like linux? OS-9 already has
> everything organized in modules. Could drivers, managers, and
> descriptors be loaded and unloaded on the fly?
> 
> 					Kevin

Kevin,
I'm pretty sure that you CAN 'load' drivers and descriptors on the fly, iniz
the descriptors, and use the device that goes with them.

The reason why you want to load as much as possible at boot time is memory
space.  If you load anything after boot, it will use an 8K page of memory
for the code , if the code isn't loaded already, and, I think, an 8K page of
memory for data space.  When everything is packed together, as with the
os9boot, the code can be packed in pages of 256 bytes, which is much more
efficient, but cannot be unloaded.

I think that you can also 'deiniz' a device, then unload the descriptor, but
only for one that you have loaded by hand.

I have done something like that with floppy descriptors. In olden days, I
used to have OS9 disks formatted 35 tracks on an 80 track drive. To be able
to read them properly now, I manually load the D2_35SS_DD descriptor, and
'dmode' the drive number to 0, then 'iniz /d2'.  Now I can read them from my
80trk double sided drive, but using /d2...

-Ben