(I found it with 2.0.30.)
Also if I boot with floppy=nodma, does that only effect the speed of
floppy access, or does it have other effects?
Thanks,
Sam
Message from Alain Knaff (alknaff@hal.local.host) on 4-14-97:
> >I got a message "floppy1 unable to allocate DMA memory" I had tried to
> >mount and "ls" an msdos floppy. I was in another virtual console when I
> >received the message. There has been a lot of discussion recently on
> >floppy drivers so maybe this problem has already been solved.
> >
> > Donald Harter Jr.
> >
>
> This problem is well known, but unfortunately there is no clean fix
> for it yet :-( The source of the problem is that only memory below
> 16M is suitable for DMA. The way how memory allocation works is that
> the memory manager first searches for suitable memory which is already
> free, and if none is found, it tries to free some more by swapping or
> tossing away buffers. Unfortunately, the last part of the algorithm
> (freeing more memory) doesn't have any knowledge of the _kind_ of
> memory requested. Hence this part will say "there is plenty of memory
> available", but all that memory will be above 16M. Thus the upper
> layer will fail because it still can't find any suitable memory.
>
> One workaround for this problem is to boot with floppy=nodma.
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