Hi, Mr. Juergen Beisert, 

I mean that, just after power on, processor leaves the reset state, the first 
instruction is fetched from 0xFFFFFFF0, the address may be led to LPC, X-BUS or 
PCI. From other people's reply, it seems an external jumper decides the 
configuration, then chipset decoding logic leads the address to the right 
place. My understanding is correct?


Best Regards

??? Feng Libo @ AMD  Ext: 20906
Mobile Phone: 13683249071
Office Phone: 0086-010-62801406

-----Original Message-----
From: Juergen Beisert [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 7:27 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: Feng, Libo
Subject: Re: [LinuxBIOS] Question about protect mode?

On Wednesday 30 May 2007 12:20, Feng, Libo wrote:
> I am also confused a little. The propriety BIOS runs in the real mode, 
> how does it test the memory beyond 1MB?

It switches also into the Linear Flat Mode. After the test is done it switches 
back to realmode.

> Another question is BIOS ROM can attach to XBUS, LPC, someone told me, 
> even PCI, how dose the address forward to the location?

At what time it accesses this devices? At system start? Or when something like 
DOS runs?
At system start see above.

When DOS runs? Hmmm. There are ways to setup all segment registers to real mode 
limits except for one, the ES. This one you could setup for baseaddress 0 and 
limit 4GiB. With this setting you could run real mode code, and whenever you 
like access addresses beyond 1MiB you simply use the segment override 
es:<blablub> for this mnemonic. But this only works within assembler. Its a 
solution, but an ugly one.
Another way is to switch into pm for every access beyond 1MiB and switch back 
to real mode when its done. This is the way some BIOSs goes to copy chunks of 
memory content from below 1MiB to above 1MiB.

Juergen





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