Hi all, > Of course, I remember discussions about handling A20 behavior. Only > main reason to support switching A20 off is bugs in MS exepacker (which was > used by MS link in many programs) and old PKLITE - they both behave > wrongly, when runs in first 64k of memory and there is HMA enabled.
This reminds me that on SOME systems, older versions of HTMLHELP crashed when DOS was using the HMA. Either caused by CATS problems or by ZLIB problems with the memory model. Somebody recompiled with KITTEN and a fresh compile of ZLIB, but I do not know if the new binary is online. In addition, I would like to know if OTHER programs which still use CATS have that kind of problem. In either case, the crash only happened when using HTMLHELP more than once without rebooting... Bernd can describe this better than me. We found out that filling the first 64k stopped the problem, but we also found that FREECOM compilation is configured to DISABLE LOADFIX if you ENABLE XMS SWAP - does anybody know if this is actually required? Looks like we really do need loadfix sometimes! Having loadfix would allow us to use A20control:off option of HIMEM, or whatever the "only ENABLE A20 and never disable it again" option is called at the moment. Even a kernel config sys SWITCH to disable disabling of the A20 would be nice: You could save memory by removing the stubs in low memory and by moving more data structures, maybe even List of Lists, into HMA, as soon as that "A20 never disabled" switch is activated. Well, LoL might be asking a bit too much - drivers could already be using it before HMA becomes accessible, and then you can no longer move LoL around. Eric ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by: Beat the post-holiday blues Get a FREE limited edition SourceForge.net t-shirt from ThinkGeek. It's fun and FREE -- well, almost....http://www.thinkgeek.com/sfshirt _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
