any virtual hardware that is passed through to real hardware. This can be noticed by any device that interacts with the real world in real time - like AP startup, which takes real time. Or keyboard LEDs, which should blink in real-time. Or floppy drives, but only when passed through to a real floppy controller on OSes which can't sufficiently buffer the floppy commands to emulate a zero latency floppy. Or IDE drives, when connecting to a physical CDROM. This was mostly a hack to get the kernel to boot faster, but it introduced a number of misvirtualization bugs, and Alan and Pavel argued pretty strongly against it. We were the only client, and now want to clean up this cruft. Signed-off-by: Zachary Amsden Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds ÕÔ˜)žEx