Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!sco!seanf From: seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: 386 machines are workstations? Message-ID: <6363@scolex.sco.COM> Date: 25 May 90 09:55:20 GMT References: <1990May13.165810.26723@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <634@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> <21440@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> <6327@scolex.sco.COM> Sender: news@sco.COM Reply-To: seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan) Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. Lines: 22 In article meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) writes: >But this is all invisable at the user level. The new mode is in >kernel space. As long as you treat all pointers as 32-bit quanities, So a user can't do something like movl (0xabcddead),r0 since that specifies a 32-bit immediate (or "offset") address, which will not work on a 32016. >there is no problem unless you have an executable that has data >sections linked at addresses > 16M, or your program dynamically needs >more than 16M. Oh. So a user program *isn't* backwards compatible. Which is it? -- -----------------+ Sean Eric Fagan | "It's a pity the universe doesn't use [a] segmented seanf@sco.COM | architecture with a protected mode." uunet!sco!seanf | -- Rich Cook, _Wizard's Bane_ (408) 458-1422 | Any opinions expressed are my own, not my employers'.