Hi-
(mostly "what R. Johnson said")
On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Mad Hatter wrote:
| I was looking through the linux (2.5.56) arch/i386/boot/bootsect.S and was
| puzzled about a couple of things:
|
| 1. Near line 221 we have:
| sread: .word 0 # sectors read of current track
| head: .word 0 # current head
| track: .word 0 # current track
|
| However, since a diskette can have at most 2 heads, 80 tracks and 36 sectors
| per track, why are these not bytes instead of words especially since space is
| at such a tight premium in this code ?
If you change those to bytes to save 3 bytes of space, and then you
change all of the instructions that load or store those values to 16-bit
registers, do you have a net saving of space?
Or you load/store them to 8-bit registers and rewrite the code, what
happens?
| 2. Near line 272 we have "movw $7, %bx" but the documentation I've
| been able to find about the "int 0x10" BIOS call says that for service
| code 0xe (write character and advance cursor), it does not take an
| attribute byte input parameter but rather uses the existing attribute. Is
| this movw instruction superfluous ?
Perhaps, or perhaps on some particular system it was found to be needed.
We don't have a fully indexed changelog history of each line AFAIK.
Ralf Brown's interrupt page for this function says:
BH = page number
BL = foreground color (graphics modes only)
(see http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-0106.htm)
Or it could be important to clear BH and setting BL to 7 was just safe.
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