From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Dec 14 23:58:17 1996 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) id XAA01966 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 14 Dec 1996 23:58:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from bugs.us.dell.com (bugs.us.dell.com [143.166.169.147]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) with SMTP id XAA01961 for ; Sat, 14 Dec 1996 23:58:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from ant.us.dell.com (ant.us.dell.com [198.64.66.34]) by bugs.us.dell.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id BAA11636; Sun, 15 Dec 1996 01:57:11 -0600 Message-Id: <3.0.1.32.19961215015705.0067a82c@bugs.us.dell.com> X-Sender: tony@bugs.us.dell.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.1 beta 4 (32) Date: Sun, 15 Dec 1996 01:57:11 -0500 To: Eivind Eklund From: Tony Overfield Subject: Re: MAXMEM was: Re: 2.1.6 on Compaq Prosignia 500 (2.1.5 worked) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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