[Pc_Support] Re: LUNA: How to get SuSE 9.2 to boot w/ 4 GB of RAM onboard -- mem=3584M

[William A. Mahaffey III]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:

>"William A. Mahaffey III" <wam at HiWAAY.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>Thanks for the detailed response, we are *quite* aware of the 
>>limitations of 4 GB address space max, minus whatever the
>>kernel/BIOS want,
>>    
>>
>
>Er, I don't think you realize the _full_details_ of such.
>
>1.  It's pretty much the "common rule" to reserve the last 384MiB for
>ROM, memory mapped I/O and other _hardware_ usage.  This _must_ be
>setup at POST time IIRC.
>
>2.  The _kernel_ space usage is _another_ detail.
>
>Using the _standard_ i486 TLB ...
>
>
>  
>
<snip>

>I could be mistaken though.  Maybe I'm thinking that the Socket-478
>only supports 3.6GiB (and not 36-bit/64GiB), _but_ it still has PAE
>so it can use the 4G/4G kernels.  I can't remember for sure.
>  
>

I have written small programs just to allocate & access (do arithmetic) 
on arbitrarily large amounts of RAM, you *can* address over 3 GB in 
user-space w/ an Intel I865 chipset & S478 CPU under SuSE 9.2 (& SuSE 
8.2, kernel 2.4.20-4GB for that matter), I have done it 1st hand. *SLOW* 
as soon as it starts to page, but that's a separate issue (those boxen 
only had 2 GB RAM or less, this one has 4 GB)

>  
>
>>we are looking for a bit over 3 GB for the application.
>>    
>>
>
>Unless you use the 4G/4G kernel model, you're going to be limited to
>2GiB userspace.
>
>  
>
>>Where do I put the "mem=3584M" line (in what file, we don't want to
>>have to remember it every time we reboot) ?
>>    
>>
>
>At the end of the kernel line in your grub.conf or lilo.conf.
>
>  
>
>>The man pages (at least the default ones) are notably sparse on
>>details of GRUB ('apropos grub' only shows 3 entries, all quite
>>truncated, virtually useless). TIA ....
>>    
>>
>
> $ info grub
>  
>

Did I mention I *loath* info :-) ?


<snip>


I think this will get us underway, thanks all :-).

-- 
	William A. Mahaffey III

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
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