[rescue] Compaq Proliant 8000

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 09:09:44AM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> 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.

I'd like to add a 6th qualification:
    6) It doesn't boot a 32bit or 64bit CPU in 16bit mode until the
       operating system takes over.