RE: "My" crash when reading partition table

nathan.zook@amd.com
Wed, 13 Oct 1999 16:01:29 -0500


You will notice that the second region is 128k short of a full 63meg. (63 +
1 = 64). When you set the command line to 64M, the system tries to use some
memory that the bios is not making available as regular memory. Crash is
inevitable. This is why I have been unhappy with advice on the list to
"Just set mem= to however much memory you have."

If you like, you could try mem=65408K. (64M - 128k) Another option would
be to turn ACPI off & see how it goes.

That NVS reserved memory is interesting. (That's the type 4 region at the
end.) Since Linux does not currently recognize NVS memory (and if it did, I
don't know how it would address that range), any operation looking like an
ACPI sleep is likely too be a bad thing...

Nathan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pavel Machek [SMTP:pavel@suse.cz]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 1999 4:02 AM
> To: Alan Cox; Zook, Nathan; linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu; david parsons
> Subject: Re: "My" crash when reading partition table
>
> Hi!
>
> > > I reported crash with reading partition table. Now I've found out:
> > > something is wrong with memory detection. Passing mem=8M makes machine
> > > boot again. That's probably why it was even in ac-10.
> >
> > Can you turn on the E820 table debugging printks and send them to the
> > kernel list ?
>
> I believe it is turned on by default.
>
> > Well, barring something horrible like e820 returning bogus values
> > that the kernel takes as gospel (what do the memory region: kernel
> > messages say?), it may be the problem the fellow from fujitsu
> > reported (boundary conditions -- the one horrible flaw I've got as a
> > programmer :-( )
> >
> > Could you try this patch and see if it makes any difference (I don't
> > think that mm/init.c has changed since then):
>
> It did NOT help.
>
> Anyway, system is toshiba satellite 4030CDT with 64Meg of ram. Strange
> thing is that I'm not able to boot with mem=63M. mem=60M works fine,
> mem=8M works, too.
>
> During bootup (and before crash), I can see a list for a short
> while. Therefore, I copied only (usable) + interesting lines.
>
> 654336 @ 0 (usable)
> 65929216 @ 100000 (usable)
> 512 @ 100b6e000 type 4
>
> It looks sane to me.
>
> Does it help?
> Pavel
> --
> I'm really pavel@ucw.cz. Look at http://195.113.31.123/~pavel. Pavel
> Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature, please!

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