On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 10:34 AM, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:

On Sun, 29 Apr 2018, Johnny Billquist wrote:

Right. The I think we're on the same page. I won't comment further on the x86 which I mentioned before, since I think we can all agree that that one is really brain damaged.

I'm not sure whether the 65C816 might actually be *more* brain-damaged in its segmentation than the 8088. That said, I suspect the 8088 is worse because of the bitshift.

For the 8088, it depends. If you don't care about no memory protection, then the segments make a nice fairly granular way to slice up the space between 'processes'. Old-school Unix for the 8088 used 'small model' to get relocatable binaries anywhere in the 1MB space. For that use case, it's quite convenient.

Of course, for anything else, or if you want memory protection, or demand pages, or well a bunch of other stuff here, it totally sucks.

Warner