alan@mq.com (Alan H. Mintz) (10/05/90)
While installing a Specialix serial board today, I noticed the init script asked whether the machine had 512K or 640K of base memory. It does this in order to recommend an address for the card's 32K address space. The question is, will XENIX install and run correctly on a machine that has it's memory mapped for 512K base and the rest above 1 meg ? When we sell a machine with 16 Megs of memory and VGA, it is tough to find address space for accessories (like more than two SI cards). Losing 128K of memory out of 16Mb is nothing compared to the benefit of another 128K of available address space! If nobody has tried this, I will do it next time I set up a machine and post the results if anyone cares. -- < Alan H. Mintz | Voice +1 714 980 1034 > < Micro-Quick Systems, Inc. | FAX +1 714 944 3995 > < 10384 Hillside Road | uucp: ...!uunet!mq!alan > < Alta Loma, CA 91701 USA | Internet: alan@MQ.COM >
aryeh@eddie.mit.edu (Aryeh M. Weiss) (10/06/90)
In article <97@mq.com> alan@mq.com (Alan H. Mintz) writes: >The question is, will XENIX install and run correctly on a machine that has >it's memory mapped for 512K base and the rest above 1 meg ? Yes it installs and runs. I have done this many times. We have several true blue (IBM) AT's which we upgraded with Intel 386 boards with 3MB. The motherboard has 512K of base; the Intel board memory starts at the 1MB address. Xenix runs fine. >When we sell a machine with 16 Megs of memory and VGA, it is tough to find >address space for accessories (like more than two SI cards). Losing 128K >of memory out of 16Mb is nothing compared to the benefit of another 128K >of available address space! I have never seen a commercial i/o card which is configurable outside the A0000-FFFFF area, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Also I do not know what typical BIOS memory sizing algorithms do, but you may run into config problems if a i/o card maps its memory starting at address 0x80000 and the BIOS decides it is general purpose RAM. --