Date: Sun, 15 Dec 1996 01:57:11 -0500 From: Tony Overfield <tony@dell.com> To: Eivind Eklund <eivind@dimaga.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: MAXMEM was: Re: 2.1.6 on Compaq Prosignia 500 (2.1.5 worked) Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19961215015705.0067a82c@bugs.us.dell.com>
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At 04:46 AM 12/15/96 +0100, Eivind Eklund wrote: >The reason I called it extremely irritating wasn't that I consider a BIOS >call for getting amount of memory a bad idea - it was the fact that this is >implemented as a protected mode call which only work if you've got EISA, >instead of an extension that could be easily detected and called for any >clone. > >Eivind Eklund gopher://nic.follonett.no:79/0eivind >Work: eivind@dimaga.com http://www.dimaga.com/ >Home: perhaps@yes.no http://maybes.yes.no/perhaps/ >All of the above is a product of either your or my imagination, and not >official. It's true that there are protected-mode EISA-specific calls to obtain the memory information. They can even be called from real-mode. However, there are, in fact, real-mode calls that are present on a great many systems, including most of the "any clone" type systems, which can provide the desired information. A few various queries using AltaVista turned up this link: http://www.uruk.org/grub/mem64mb.html which documents the calls. Perhaps not coincidentally, the link at: http://www.uruk.org/grub/ describes a fancy boot loader. - Tony
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