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Subject: Re: AUTO232 and memory protection

Author: Eugene Nalimov

Date: 10:29:52 02/03/99

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On February 03, 1999 at 12:53:07, Ed Schröder wrote:

>>Posted by Robert Hyatt on February 03, 1999 at 09:45:57:
>
>>first, the above description of himem is _wrong_. running under dos, there is
>>_nothing_ to be done to 'protect' memory, which is one of the great gaffes of
>>the dos O/S design...  have you never written a program that clears _all_ of
>>memory and hangs the system?  Because you cleared the O/S (dos) as well?  So
>>_anybody_ can write into your memory, you can write into anybody's memory.
>
>>First level of damage assessment should be to find a copy of 'purify' or some
>>such program and run Rebel in it.  This detects memory leaks, bad stores, bad
>>loads, etc... slows it way down, but it finds a lot of memory-related
>>problems.
>
>>If it is the auto232 driver, you are probably stuck...  move to an O/S that
>>does memory protection (windows, unix, etc)  and that problem will go away, if it
>>isn't something in your program doing this...
>
>
>The text below is taken from MicroSoft.
>
>  HIMEM is an Extended Memory Manager--a program that controls the
>  use of  extended memory and HMA (High Memory Area). This to
>  prevent that (2) programs can use (write) the same memory at the
>  same time.
>
>There is no reference to Windows so I assume that HIMEM.SYS is also
>valid for DOS.
>
>Ed

What the above text say is that HIMEM acts as a memory allocator
for HMA. Without it there is no way for program to know what parts
of HMA are used by other programs. HIMEM keep track of that, and
have a set of API for memory allocation, deallocation, etc.
Incorrect program still can overwrite *any* DOS memory including
HMA.

Eugene



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