Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:22:34 +0200 | From | Helge Hafting <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] trim memory not covered by WB MTRRs |
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Jesse Barnes wrote: > On some machines, buggy BIOSes don't properly setup WB MTRRs to > cover all available RAM, meaning the last few megs (or even gigs) > of memory will be marked uncached. Since Linux tends to allocate > from high memory addresses first, this causes the machine to be > unusably slow as soon as the kernel starts really using memory > (i.e. right around init time). > > This patch works around the problem by scanning the MTRRs at > boot and figuring out whether the current end_pfn value (setup > by early e820 code) goes beyond the highest WB MTRR range, and > if so, trimming it to match. A fairly obnoxious KERN_WARNING > is printed too, letting the user know that not all of their > memory is available due to a likely BIOS bug. > I assume this cannot be fixed by the simple approach of echoing some useful numbers into /proc/mtrr like we used to do for video memory? (Before X did this automatically?)
An extra bootscript seems better than loosing memory.
Helge Hafting - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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