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Real Mode SMBIOS search first/next

Posted: Fri May 29, 2015 11:23 pm
by TightCoderEx
Written for FASM 1.70.03 - Intel 16 bit

I've tried a few implementations of this using handle, ordinate position and buffer size that didn't work very well at all. It would seem backward compatibility has its drawbacks. My design intent is to have a means by which to pass a structure type to procedure and if found an offset in buffer to the strings if applicable to that type in AX. DH=FF facilitates subsequent entries of the same type such as type 8 (Port Connector Information).

My test beds are Dell OptiPlex GX1, BOCH's and Lenovo ThinkCenter and shortly I will have an Acer laptop in the mix.

Unlike the other two, Lenovo's tables did not follow immediately after 32 byte Table Entry Point, but it was page aligned. My algo depends on this and will return with CF and AX = 1 to 15 being offset from page if so.

Has anyone encountered a situation where tables were not page aligned?

Dell's first entry is a type DF for a length of 4D. This leads me to believe even system and OEM types (80 - FF) will come ahead of 7F (Table termination). Is this assumption correct?

Inevitably there will be protected and long mode versions of this, but for convenience sake I have original versions of DOS running on these test platforms.

Re: Real Mode SMBIOS search first/next

Posted: Fri May 29, 2015 11:37 pm
by alexfru
It would probably be useful to tell others what you're talking about.