At 04:47 PM 4/8/2004 -0400, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote: >It might be reasonable to say that HIMEM64 "owns" the A20 gate, and >therefore must be the first program to manipulate it. If this fails >to work under some emulated environment, that environment is arguably >broken... I just took a peek at the memdisk (from SYSLINUX) code, and >it disables the A20 gate before booting the virtual machine. I think. > >I can test under memdisk and VMware if you want to give this a whirl. >Your call.
I'm not sure at this point in the endgame I'm ready to move a first "is-enabled" test for always-on from the end of the test chain to the beginning, since under "no-damage" scenarios it should fall safely through to the end anyway. And it's a nontrivial change in the logic flow, besides making initial state assumptions that should be true, but may not necessarily be true in the overall universe of 386+ PC brands. Although, if Linux does it that way, it should be relatively safe. But Linux too, as discussed previously, has machines which it fails on. And FreeDOS is more likely to get the oldest, weirdest, and least-compatible in comparison. I would feel better about the whole thing if I could crack the code on how stuff gets adjudged sufficiently important to make the FreeDOS main page announcements, and whether it is legal/appropriate to post a call for HIMEM testers there if and when we come up with a modified HIMEM. Mail-list posts get a fraction of the web traffic readers, based on the response I've seen to both. Without a fairly large test base to check things, significantly changing HIMEM logic is a volatile situation since it's at least semi-stable right now. Lot easier to move in the wrong direction when changing things. With a good-sized test base, though, I'd try moving the always-on logic to front of the line. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
