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Source: Frank Field (furd@alum.mit.edu)
Moderator: Christopher B. Wright (wrightc@dtcweb.com)
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I'm not sure this is the appropriate place to post 
this but, in the course of trying to figure out why 
OS/2 didn't recognize all the RAM installed on my 
Gigabyte GA-7IX motherboard, I learned somthing I 
think is relatively important to the OS/2 community.  
The answer, straight from the horse's mouth at 
Phoenix Tech is as follows:

================

OS/2 and Windows NT/9x use different BIOS calls to 
determine how much memory is available.  OS/2 uses 
INT 15h,AX=E801h while Windows uses INT 15h,AX=E820h.
 
Look here, http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int.htm 
  to see the 
details.

Award has had support for the E801 call since late in 
1995.  Recently, though, this support was made 
conditional on ACPI in order to pass an Intel 
"Component Validation Test".  In other words a BIOS 
with ACPI support could not have E801 support. Very 
recently (October), this code was refined to allow 
the E801 support to be included even if ACPI is 
supported.

=============

Thus, the GA-7IX (and many other new motherboards as 
well, I have learned) are essentially incompatible 
with an emerging hardware standard.  I think that we 
may need to find a way to "suggest" to IBM that they 
change the OS/2 boot memory detection algorithm soon 
to at least accomodate this emerging standard.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Does anyone have any more/definate information
on this problem?
 
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