A whole bunch less.
If I've got a machine with 64mb of memory and I do bigphysarea=40m,
then expand to 128mb of memory, I'll be left with 88mb of usable
memory without user intervention.
If I've got a machine with 32mb of memory and I do mem=24m, then
expand to 128mb of memory, I'll be left with 24mb of usable memory
without user intervention.
I've had the second happen; I had a system on an eisa-ish motherboard
once upon a time, so I needed to set mem=32m (because I couldn't get
my enhanced memory detection to work on Compaq EISA machines. Grrr.)
with it. Over time, that machine evolved and ended up as a 2x80521
machine with 96mb of memory. Which, of course, was only `detecting'
32mb of it, and the only reason I realized that I still had this
horrible usermode hack (all of my machines use my enhanced memory
detection code) was that I was working on the Mastodon installer and
realized that it was only detecting 32mb (and even then I did a few
passes through the kernel code before realizing that this horrible
lilo hack was the reason why.)
>I think this
>is not unreasonable as such devices need not be considered mainstream.
Tape drives aren't mainstream?
____
david parsons \bi/ Leave memory management to the kernel, since that's
\/ what it's there for.
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