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Re: gas/ld x86 16-bit 64kb limit and ominous "unreal mode"
On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> > There's more to it
> >
> > http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0307.3/1132.html
> >
> > I was totally blown away how far madness can go :)
>
> I would not count on anything other than the canonical real and
> protected modes actually working. Maybe "unreal" and "forreal" worked
> on the original 80386, but the current chips don't work anything like
> the way it did.
Hmm, strange -- these quirks have been pretty well described in Intel's
Pentium manual (I don't remember if these bits propagated to the Pentium
Pro manual; I'd expect so, though, as it's been rather extensive per Intel
standards) and breaking backward compatibility for *documented* behaviour
is not anything I'd expect to see from Intel...
Maciej