Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On 6 Mar 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> > I did some tracing of the alpha at power up and it was getting
> > read-modify-write cycles when the SROM was zeroing RAM, in an attempt
> > to do the ECC setup properly. And it wasn't getting ECC errors.
>
> wait! This means that even the BIOS can't do memory init correctly. That's
> an exciting thought.
At least in one case yes. It wasn't the worlds best test but it did
seem to indicate that. I was really hoping for a fast way to write
through the caches on alpha at that point.
> > I didn't check but the writes are also useless unless you have ECC
> > enabled at the time you do them.
>
> makes sense. So my old theory about the kernel covering you were
> wrong. This sounds like a needed enhancement to page zero in kernels --
> making sure it's write-only.
Yes, it isn't the kernel covering us that makes it work.
Hmm. I thought page zero was already read-only, but how that is
relevant currently escapes me.
Eric
