*BSD News Article 46443


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!europa.chnt.gtegsc.com!howland.reston.ans.net!Germany.EU.net!nntp.gmd.de!nntp.darmstadt.gmd.de!news.th-darmstadt.de!fauern!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!bonnie.heep!not-for-mail
From: j@bonnie.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Unusual Boot Message
Date: 5 Jul 1995 13:08:39 +0200
Organization: Private U**x site, Dresden.
Lines: 21
Message-ID: <3tdrrn$fh4@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de>
References: <3tchlt$rre@ice.cs.ubc.ca>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.109.108.139
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Terry Coatta <coatta@nsg.bc.ca> wrote:
>Shortly after the FreeBSD kernel has loaded from disk, the following
>message is printed on my screen:
>
>   BIOS basemem (639K) != RTC basemem (640K)
>
>Anyone know what this pithy little snippet means?

That your BIOS is stealing 1 KB off the 640 K basemem to store its
disk table there (for user-type disk [47]).  Not much to care about
except that it would be an additional kilobyte invisible for DOS
itself.  More modern BIOSes do this by putting the table into the BIOS
stack.

This is only a hint, and benign in the above case.  If the numbers
would have been 256K vs. 640K, it might have been serious though.
-- 
cheers, J"org                      private:   joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
                                   http://www.sax.de/~joerg/

Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)