Re: >64MB RAM problems, why?

From: Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (bero@redhat.com)
Date: Wed Apr 05 2000 - 14:05:09 EST


On Wed, 5 Apr 2000 tcrompton@home.com wrote:

> And I know some users who still have this problem using kernel 2.2, so
> why does this bug occur?

It's still a BIOS problem: There are two different BIOS calls that are
supposed to tell you how much memory you have.
One of them in general doesn't support more than 64 MB. The other
theoretically supports a lot more, but some BIOSes either lack it or have
a broken implementation of it.
On most BIOSes, Linux detects more memory without problems.

> I say bug because new users are convinced that this is a Linux bug,
> since Windows 95 or greater detects all of their RAM just fine.

Since they don't release source, we can't check what they're doing.
My guess is they're doing it the hard way (actually accessing the memory
and seeing if it triggers a problem).

LLaP
bero

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