On Sat, 26 Feb 2000, david parsons wrote:
>
> > - do the old-style calls regardless
>
> The e801 call is broken on some new bioses -- I've got some Pentium II
> boxes where e801 cheerfully returns 550mb on a machine that only has
> 128mb of core.
That's fine. I'm not advocating _using_ the value. I'm really advocating:
- the 16-bit assembly language does all the calls, and gathers all the
information.
- the 16-bit assembly language does NOT try to maek sense of the
information, In particular, it doesn't try to figure out whether the
information is broken or not, or _which_ of the memory information it
should use.
- in short, the 16-bit assembly code is STUPID.
- ..and all the real WORK is done in C. In an __init section that gets
thrown away. Not in unreadable assembly code. Especially not if the
rules are arbitrary and pretty much made up to match BIOS bugs in the
first place.
See my argument?
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 29 2000 - 21:00:16 EST