On 2017-10-13 14:51, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 1:32 AM, Steve D'Aprano ><steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> It seems to me that you're not talking about ROM at all, but ordinary RAM. >> Then what do you mean by "read only"? A block of memory with a flag that >> says "unprivileged processes are prohibited from writing here"? >> >> (That's also not a rhetorical question.) > > When I first learned about Protected Mode (as defined by the Intel > 80386 and used in OS/2), there was a real concept of read-only RAM. > The program loader would fetch up the executable file (data on the > disk) and construct its segments: code, data, and BSS/stack.
This is still the case. The granularity is just finer now: Instead of segments you use pages. (The 386 was the first x86 processor which supported paging. OS/2 probably used segments because it was originally designed for the 286.) hp -- _ | Peter J. Holzer | Fluch der elektronischen Textverarbeitung: |_|_) | | Man feilt solange an seinen Text um, bis | | | h...@hjp.at | die Satzbestandteile des Satzes nicht mehr __/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | zusammenpaĆt. -- Ralph Babel -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list