Here is my knowlegde described best, based what I have seen on the Arca Noae tester list and what I have been reading on UEFI over the years. It was the intension at Mensys to get UEFI in eComStation. But this never got of ground. Anyway so my description is based on what I know from Mensys days, picked up from Warpstock Orlando last year and the from the AN testers list.
Anyway so your question is where does this come from Martin:
"Video memory cannot be reassigned to 32-bit address!"
Well here is the background thd way I understand it. Have a seat as this is slightly complex.
The first thing is that ArcaOS comes with a 64 BIT UEFI loader. However the OS/2 kernel still is 32 bit.
When a system with a UEFI firmware boots up the CPU still is switched on real mode. Like an XT CPU, yep even today.
However then the UEFI firmware switches the CPU to long mode (64 bit).
Well OS/2 does not support long mod, also the Intel CPU can not run certain modes the OS/2 kernel needs.
What the UEFI loader does is the following.
UEFI firmware just like a PC BIOS has calls to talk to the CD Rom DRIVE, SATA or NVMe controller. However they function differently.
On legacy PC BIOS You might have heard of term int INT13. INT 13 is disc I/O via the BIOS. This is what the BIOS/OS/2 uses to load the OS2LDR, OS2KRNL and BASEDEV drivers etc.
UEFI firmware also has disc services. However they work differently. All UEFI loaders prepare to load the need files to load the OS from hard drive via UEFI system calls. Once the OS is ready to boot the UEFI loader calls the UEFI API Exitfrombootservices().
So just before ArcaOS starts and you see the text OS/2 boot blobt in the left hand corner, thats when the UEFI loader begins load the OS2DLR and OS2KNRL from a temp ram drive.
However what also happens is that the CPU is switched from long mode to 32 bit legacy so that the OS2KRNL can run.
Elbert Pol and Alex Taylor both had a laptop that had this error message. In the UEFI loader is code that goes out on the PCI bus and re-maps PCI MMIO ranges to 32 bit memory location. Why ? Otherwhise the drivers and kernel would not be able to talk to hardware with an address above the 32 bit address range.
Elbert Pol has a laptop where all devices have 64 bit MMIO ranges and these are remapped by the UEFI loader BEFORE the OS2KRNL gets loaded.
The issue is thhis brand new code and it might contain bugs. However its also possible this might not work in all cases.
If you get such a message here is how you can get the logs from the UEFI loader.
https://www.os2.org/viewtopic.php?p=28539&sid=7c108ad6baf4d31112ec69f674e23f7b#p28539Note that difference in ALT F1 processing. This is in the UEFI loader NOT done by OS/2 but by the UEFI loader.
But the UEFI loader does more. Ever looked at the Panorama screen object ? It also provides a extremely thin VESA vidoe BIOS
for Panorama to function on systems with a VGA card.
I hope this creates a somewheat better understanding of the new things. If there are issue's please encourage people to also open tickets in the AN bugtracker. There is a lot of new code and there can always be bugs. And some of these bugs the community can not fix or understand as this all brand new.
Roderick