Scott Duplichan wrote:
]1) When booting a DOS drive, a disk read error occurs at some point ]after autoexec executes.
The revised patch (attached) overcomes this problem. It turns out in the latter stage of booting, DOS makes a couple of INT13 read requests with a buffer that is not word aligned. AHCI only supports word aligned buffers. This was causing the data to be shifted by one byte for these reads. The patch adds unaligned support for reads only, which is good enough for the DOS boot problem. The method of this patch actually writes one byte beyond the end of the caller's buffer. But the only OS seen to do this is DOS, so it may be good enough this way.
]2) DOS booting is slower by 100-200 ms. While that isn't much in ]absolute terms, it is a big percentage increase from the 642 ms I ]can get using the IDE interface.
Now AHCI DOS boot is slower than IDE DOS boot by only 40 ms, so I am satisfied and have switched my project over to AHCI mode.
Thanks, Scott