And somewhere in a museum, a 386 motherboard smiled, its LDS instruction still perfectly capable of crashing any program that dared to wake it.
“It poisoned its own segment register,” Eleanor whispered. “Like a snake biting its tail.” x86 lds
She wrote a small C helper using memcpy to safely read the 32-bit value into a local unsigned long , then manually set DS and BX via __asm —but with interrupts disabled via _disable() . Clunky, but safe. And somewhere in a museum, a 386 motherboard
After patching, the model ran. It plotted Devonian shale layers for three hours without a single fault. Clunky, but safe
The disassembly pointed to one instruction: LDS .
Eleanor muttered, “Oh, you ancient beast.”
The GPF happened when LDS tried to read from DS:SI —but DS had been clobbered by an interrupt handler. So LDS cheerfully loaded garbage into DS itself, because that’s what LDS does: it writes the segment part of the loaded pointer directly into the DS register. Now DS pointed to an unmapped address. The next instruction—a simple mov ax, [bx] —caused the system to keel over.