Messages in this thread | | | From | "William M. Perkins" <> | Subject | 16 MB -> 32 MB, a memory problem resolved! | Date | Sun, 14 Apr 1996 20:43:33 -0400 (EDT) |
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An observation.
This last week I added an additional 16 MB of memory to my 486/DX2 system for total of 32 MB. I came up with what I thought was an unusual problem. With this additional memory installed, the system would not boot. It kept stopping at the "VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly" message. This is at the point that init is started.
I played around with hardware and lilo options and discovered that the system would boot okey if I either used the kernel boot command option of "mem=16m", or if I turned off the hardware external cache. Neither of these options were very good. So I limped along and read some linux mail from vger.rutgers.edu. I do not remember which piece of mail it was that I read, because that mail had already hit the bit bucket, but some discussion that was being carried on finally sank into my brain about adjusting memory options during the boot phase of the system to compensate for this kind of a hardware problems.
What I found out was that if I told the kernel I had 384 KB less than what I really had, the system would boot with nearly all of the available 32 MB of memory, and the external cache as well.
I do not know why I cannot use the last 384 KB of memory. Maybe the hardware is relocating something it needs to upper memory. The point as I see it is that this kind of a problem demonstrates a variation in way that motherboards are designed. Linux needs to be able to work with as many of these different variations as it can if it is to be a successful operating system.
Bill
-- William M. Perkins Internet - wperkins@us.net The Greenwood or - bill@cais.com Commodore is dead. Long lives the Amiga! (AmigaOS/Linux/NetBSD)
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