Date: Sun, 5 Feb 95 14:55:09 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de (Christoph P. Kukulies) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Bios basemem (637K) != RTC basemem (640K) Message-ID: <9502052155.AA03368@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199502052114.WAA15175@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> from "Christoph P. Kukulies" at Feb 5, 95 10:14:12 pm
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> > Excuse my ignorance, but what does that mean? Do I have to worry? It means that either your BIOS starts counting at 0 and something swiped 2k of memory, or your BIOS starts counting a 1 and someone swiped 3k of memory. Or your BIOS starts counting at -2 and nothing is swiping any memory at all. Personally, I have use an AT&T 6386 WGS system that reported 639k all the time because it started counting at 0. I have also used an HP Vectra system that said 636k because it had some wierd disk information that the BIOS put there. BSD sees something more than 512 but less than 640, then issues the warning, not because the memory isn't there and usable, but because it's going to assume you really have 640k, and it wants you to know that it is making that assumption. Depending on your machine and BIOS, it's probably nothing worse than the user configurable IDE drive table. One case is that your boot blocks are eating the memory for something; typically, something like the OnTrack boot code that loads an INT 13 redirector to go drive geometry translation for an EIDE drive. One of these is the most likely case. Absolute total worst case is a boot block virus. Since BSD doesn't use BIOS for I/O, and the kernel isn't typically named a DOS name, this isn't a problem unless you run DOS. You may want to pull down a virus chacker from wuarchive.wustl.edu, if you are absolutely paranoid. 8-).
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