For the purposes of just seeing what the kernel does, even in protected mode, with regards to both virtual and physical memory, an easier method may be to run it in an emulator instead of trying to examine the running operating system. Try something like bochs. http://bochs.sourceforge.net/ A colleague of mine uses Bochs for simulating Linux on an x86 for his runtime trace optimization research. Apparently Bochs is a really well constructed and designed piece of work; expecially nice if it becomes necessary to dig under Bochs itself to see what it's doing in terms of emulation. -Jing -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml