On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Mark Zealey wrote: > On Fri, Mar 01, 2002 at 12:23:06PM +0530, Ketan Mukadam wrote: > None. It's useless to all but DOS, so it's needed for doze 95 and 98, not 2k or > nt as they are pure 32 bit, aparently > > Real mode is used for low level bios interrupts to find out stuff about the > system and also load the OS from the media, which can't be done from pmode > because intel suck. Indeed, but you also sometimes need to do stuff which would normally be easier in real mode (paging *complicates* things), but in protected mode so you see the memory addressing tango take place ;) A case in point is PCI BIOS calls and perhaps a few others. The quasi-real virtual 8086 mode is also interesting in this respect. Zwane -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
