ES> -=> Quoting Bruce Simpson to MIKE BILOW <=-

ES> BS> There is no reason (other than historical) that device drivers need be
ES> BS> limited to 16-bit code.  It would appear that OS/2 (at least the 2.1x
ES> BS> versions) retained a fair amount of low-level code from OS/2 1.x.

ES>        Well I can see why the main reason behind the 16-Bit device
ES>drivers are made.  How many 32-Bit or higher cards do you have in
ES>your system.  I think that they should allow true 32-Bit ones
ES>also though.  Also the 16-Bit ones can be easily multitasked by
ES>OS/2, since two of them could occupy the 32-Bit range, 16+16.

Well what about cached block I/O devices such as disk-drives?

As soon as the cache size goes over 64Kbytes, 16bit code will run slower
than 32-bit due to the need to reload segment registers.  An obvious
admission of this by IBM is the availability of HPFS386.  I think that
perhaps IBM's attitude to device drivers is "if it ain't broken, don't
fix it" which is fair enough.  Still, I always smile when they say that
OS/2 is a "Full 32bit OS" and (in the same breath) say that Win'95 is no
good because it still has some 16-bit code which is a legacy of Win3.1
:-)

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