Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 16 Oct 2000 16:46:04 +0200 | From | Constantine Gavrilov <> | Subject | Re: K7 on SD11 and 2.2.17: memory not detected |
| |
Alan Cox wrote: > > > 2.2.18-pre with good results on Thinkpad 600x. No adverse consequencies > > (memory is reported correctly, suspend/hibernate work fine). I also had > > a chance to use it on several big SMP and UP servers (where e801 memory > > reporting works fine) Intel, Compaqs and IBM. No adverse consequencies > > either. What do you say? > > Until every 2.4.0 doesnt boot case has been accounted for (within reason anyway) > no. Wrong mem sizing returns that are not caught are a great way to take out > your entire root fs
Funny, my impression from reading the lk is that boot failures are not connected with E820 memory detection. It is (at least in the backport patch) configurable and can be turned off. Have people who experience boot failures tried booting with E820 disabled? I know there were some problems with E820 on some machines but Linus has fixed it himself in early 2.4.x.
As for corruption, manually specifying mem=xxx to the kernel is no less dangerous. Probably more, because subtle problems are possible. Consider all those cases when people use mem=128m when they sould have used mem=127m because of BIOS, ACPI, video, or whatever. What happens then? A crash and a serious root fs corruption 10 hours after boot? At least with E820 (if we do not expect to work for all machines) people will see at boot time that memory was misdetected.
Of course, it is just a MHO. I am just greatly annoyed that most laptops and home computers these days will report 64M of RAM if e801 scheme is used. Servers do not have this problem. It is too late now to fight that standard (PC 99). We have to embrace it now, otherwise it causes slanderers to say that Linux does not support above 64M of RAM. Again, this just a MHO.
-- ---------------------------------------- Constantine Gavrilov Unix System Administrator and Programmer Xpert Integrated Systems 1 Shenkar St, Herzliya 46725, Israel Phone: (972-8)-952-2361 Fax: (972-9)-952-2366 ---------------------------------------- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |