Re: [PATCH] i386: always clear bss

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> writes:

> Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> 
>> My notes show 0x5c reserved for additional apm_bios_info, although
>> of the top of my head I don't know how realistic that is.
>> 
>> 0x1e4 does look available.
>> 
>> It has been a long time since I made that choice, and I do see that
>> looking at struct screen_info I did remember to document that I was
>> using 0x3c, even in your structure.
>> 
>> It is all internal to our boot process and external code isn't going
>> to use it so we can change it if we feel like.
>> 
>
> I don't see the actual instruction that does that anywhere in my tree,
> which was branched from Andi's "for-linus" git tree, but I have reserved
> 0x1e4 for that purpose as "scratch".

I have this vague memory of liking 0x3c because if we do happen to use
more room then we intended the consequences are pretty benign.

But that is a pretty minor consequence.

Eric