lyon_wonder wrote:

And I thought this reserved for memory hardware crap died out with the
real mode 8086 and it's archaic 640k and reserved for hardware 384k.

Since it never died out, or even gasped a teensy bit, and has been there in
every single x86 system ever made, and expanded by PCI and further expanded
by PCI express, it hardly qualifies as 'archaic'.

In fact, rather than 'die out' it has grow, lived long, and prospered.


BIOS/firmware hub (2 MB)
Local APIC (19 MB)
Digital Media Interface (40 MB)
Front side bus interrupts (17 MB)
PCI Express configuration space (256 MB)
MCH base address registers, internal graphics ranges, PCI Express ports (up to 512 MB)
Memory-mapped I/O that is dynamically allocated for PCI Conventional and
PCI Express add-in cards

The amount of installed memory that can be used will vary based
on add-in cards and BIOS settings. Figure 14 shows a schematic
of the system memory map. All installed system memory can be
used when there is no overlap of system addresses.