Slight correction:  PAE paging can access up to 52 physical address bits, for 4 PBytes of memory.  Section 4.4 of the Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual Volume 3 (3A, 3B, 3C & 3D): System Programming Guide covers it.

Brian J. Johnson


From: Andrew Fish via groups.io [mailto:afish=apple.com@groups.io]
Sent: Wednesday, November 9, 2022 at 11:20 AM
To: devel@edk2.groups.io, yoshinoyatoko@163.com
Subject: [edk2-devel] Access 64bit address space in 32bit mode


On Nov 7, 2022, at 7:16 PM, Yoshinoya <yoshinoyatoko@163.com> wrote:

Hello
Is it possible to access 64bit address space in 32bit mode?


I assume you are talking about x86?


For example, opcode prefix 0x66/67 could let code running in 16bit mode to access 32bit data/address.


This is more complex than just instruction prefix. You need the CPU to be setup in big real mode via the GDT, so you basically have a 32-bit environment setup via GDT etc. Also the prefix opcodes have different meaning in different modes. I don’t think there is a way to make 32-bit code access 64-bit data via instruction prefix even if a 64-bit GDT was setup with paging enabled.  

Or, establishing page table is a must requirement for accessing 64bit address space.


For x86 you have to have 64-bit versions of the IDT, GDT, and you need to enable paging to enter 64-bit Long Mode. 

In a 32-bit x86 world you can access up to 64 GB of physical memory via using 32-bit page table using PAE [1]. PAE is a 32-bit virtual address space, but with support for a 36-bit physical address. I think in the olden days of 32-bit x86 EFI servers would have custom EFI code that enabled paging in 32-bit and carved out a chunk of the 32-bit memory space that could be mapped to 36-bit physical addresses. I think this was platform specific code and I don’t know of any open source version. The 32-bit Long Mode EFI does not have paging enabled, so adding PAE means enabling paging yourself. 

The edk2 has the opposite version of this code so you can call 16-bit really mode (Legacy BIOS) from 32-bit Protected mode, or 64-bit Long Mode. This is the code to Thunk for 32-bit/64-bit mode to 16-bit code [2]/ 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
[2] https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/master/MdePkg/Library/BaseLib/X86Thunk.c

Thanks,

Andrew Fish


Thanks