[comp.sys.ibm.pc] PC's and DMA - bad chip warning

darrylo@hpsrli.HP.COM (Darryl Okahata) (02/08/88)

In comp.sys.ibm.pc, paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen) writes:

> Jay Bowden posted a description of the brain-dead DMA hardware in the
> IBM PC and look-alikes and asked what DOS does if you ask for a DMA
> transfer that would cross a 64K boundary.  [If you missed Jay's posting,
> the PC DMA hardware is incapable of crossing a 64K page boundary during
> a transfer.  It simply wraps around to the begining of the page!]
> 
> Basically, you only need to worry about this if you are programming the
> DMA chip directly.  You just allocate a one-block buffer in your driver

     You also have to worry about this if you use the ROM BIOS to read
from a disk; if the buffer that you are using to read/write data crosses a
64K boundary, the transfer will fail (I believe the error code returned is
"DMA_BOUNDARY" -- 09H).

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul L. Allen                       | paula@boeing.com
> Boeing Advanced Technology Center   | ...!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!paula

     -- Darryl Okahata
	{hplabs!hpccc!, hpfcla!} hpsrla!darrylo
	CompuServe: 75206,3074

Disclaimer: the above is the author's personal opinion and is not the
opinion or policy of his employer or of the little green men that
have been following him all day.