[SeaBIOS] How much RAM is required?

[Markus Armbruster]

Frediano Ziglio <frediano.ziglio at citrix.com> writes:

> On Fri, 2012-08-10 at 16:24 +0200, Peter Stuge wrote:
>> Fred . wrote:
>> > No, I am not.
>> 
>> Ok, so there's only a hypothesis.
>> 
>> 
>> > But I believe QEMU does have the functionality to load an arbitrary
>> > firmware. So the firmware doesn't necessarily have to be SeaBIOS.
>> 
>> As you may know the 8086 reset vector is at 1MB-16 so it will be
>> really difficult to run a PC-like machine with less than 1MB of
>> memory. I don't believe one has ever existed.
>> 
>
> I remember that my manual of the NEC V20 (a 8086 clone with 10 MHZ!) has
> settings for 256KB of RAM (jumpers of course!)
>
> The ROM was "mapped" (physically!) at f0000 with extended ROM at e0000.

According to Wikipedia, the original IBM PC was sold with as little as
16KiB RAM.  IIRC, 64KiB BIOS ROM at the top of the 1MiB address space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC

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