Subject: Re: Using dosboot ?
To: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>
From: Martin Husemann <martin@rumolt.teuto.de>
List: port-i386
Date: 03/18/2000 18:59:25
> Thanks.   Personally I would have assumed that "secure mode" (called
> "safe mode" in the bios of this system, but that's irrelevant) would
> be one in which less "damage" to the system would be possible...

No, it's "safer to assume the system will come up in case of trouble",
as only minimal configuration is booted.

The full reasons why it works in this mode and not in "command prompt only"
are beyound my debugging skills. I tried realy hard to dig into this some
time but failed miserably.

In principal we are able to boot with himem.sys loaded via dosboot. It
fully worked in the 1.3 release, it works for some kernel configurations
in 1.4 and I didn't care to check the current state.

The problem arises when something (APM was the first cuplrit) does 8/16 bit
BIOS calls. The trampoline code to get back to this mode from 32 bit fails
with himem and we don't know why and how to debug this. Probably some
MMU tricks played to get more DOS memory get in our way.


Martin