Re: AW: [Fwd: Re: EDE - Personal Suggestions and Ideas]

Dan Olson
2004-05-27T05:56:51Z

> What about supporting 286 protected mode in a manner that more than one
> text+data segment per program are possible - still far-pointers were to be
> implmented, but would segment switching not be easier with HW-protection (in
> comparison to 8086)? I am not familiar with compiler programming, so I
> have no idea of how much work it would be.

It seems like this came up in the past and the conclusion was that there
weren't enough 286s to make it worth while, the code wouldn't work on the
8088/8086 and of course a 386SX will run a stripped Linux.

> The last time I looked into the elks sources there was code for initializing
> 286 protected mode - don't know if it works.

You know, that sounds familar. Was there was work to use protected mode
in order to use extended memory as a RAM drive? Maybe I'm thinking of
something else.

Dan