[SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS PAE experiment
Rudolf Marek
r.marek at assembler.cz
Tue Sep 29 20:19:19 CET 2015
Hi Kevin,
> * The reason why PAE is interesting (instead of standard i386 paging)
> is that it allows for 64bit mappings and because one can set it up
> with just a single level page directory of 2MB pages. The single
> level page directory makes maintaining it much easier.
There is a performance penalty if you do it for first 2MB of phys memory on some
P6/XeonP4 CPUs. Others could trigger undefined behaviour.
The reason for this are the special regions in the 640KB-1MB covered by various
MTRRs. See 11.11.9 Large Page Size Considerations in the Intel manual for the
details.
Thanks
Rudolf
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