As I was sitting on the throne -- c'mon you know all about how inspiration occurs -- it occurred to me that there ought to be a way to determine the system bus speed. Otherwise, how would all these fast IDE drives know to operate at full speed (100 MHz) or reduced speed (66 Mhz) or even slower? If the drive can run at 100 Mhz, the CPU should be able to determine this.

Assuming that the message "Assuming 33 MZ system bus speed" comes from the ide device driver, it follows that the driver ought to make some sort of determination of actual speed. Then again, what is the assumption for anyway, since the OS is in fact booting from the ide drive which is operating at 100 MHz?

If I have to do some C programming so be it -- C is cool -- I just wonder what this thing will run like if I can get the OS to run the bus at full rated speed.