Re: Max memory again

Kurt Garloff (K.Garloff@ping.de)
Tue, 5 Jan 1999 13:16:46 +0100


On Tue, Jan 05, 1999 at 09:05:51AM +0000, Riley Williams wrote:
> Hi Alan.
>
> >> I clarified the message and added a line telling the user to have
> >> a look at linux/include/asm-i386/page.h, if he wants more physical
> >> RAM to be supported. And I also added three lines to
> >> include/asm-i386/page.h explaining that the per process virtual
> >> mem will shrink, if the PAGE_OFFSET is decreased.
>
> > So now the user is both confused and scared by the message. The
> > right fix is to put back Ingo's memory size patch but change it to
> > a menu option of 1Gig, 2Gig , 3Gig or similar as 2.0.37pre does

I don't think it does confuse or scare anybody, but rather tell the truth:
The way your kernel was compiled, it only supports 960MB of phys.
RAM. If you want more, you have to change it. But there's a drawback, if
you have processes needing very much virtual memory.

> I submitted a patch a while back that provided a set of options
> allowing this to be set from 0.75G to 3G in 0.25G steps (using a
> 'choice' statement with 1G as the default), and I still believe this
> to be the best method and granularity.

This is the better approach, I agree.

> The patch apparently missed changing arch/i386/vmlinux.lds and wasn't
> applied as a result, but as I stated in a post at the time, I don't
> know the language the said file is written in, so can hardly expect to
> patch it appropriately......

As said, you don't need full understanding. sed s/0x.0000000/NEWVAL/ will do
the job.

-- 
Kurt Garloff <kurt@garloff.de>                           [Dortmund, FRG]  
Plasma physics, high perf. computing              [Linux-ix86,-axp, DUX]
PGP key on http://www.garloff.de/kurt/        [Linux SCSI driver: DC390]

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