>> So I modified my lilo.conf with an append statement. Sad to say
>> when I rebooted my machine, I got a kernel panic. It says it can't
>> mount the root fs. I booted from a floppy, removed the append
>> statement in my lilo.conf and run /sbin/lilo. Again, I rebooted my
>> machine, this time I specified mem=128MB in the LILO boot prompt.
>> It encountered the same problem.
>> I restarted the machine. Didn't specify anything at the boot
>> prompt. Everything went fine but the kernel only detects 64MB of
>> RAM. Am I missing something here? Is there a problem somewhere
>> else?
> Well, basically you missed the fact that the BIOS grabs some
> memory, leaving less for Linux. Then you tell Linux "go ahead,
> use all the memory" and somewhat later Linux discovers that
> some of the memory isn't there anymore because the BIOS grabs
> it. Unfortunately, the hardware has crashed since then...
I have two motherboards that do that...and have met six other
motherboards with the same problem...
> The solution is either to specify mem=127M, or mem=xxxxxK
> where you have calculated the amount of kilobytes left.
> 127.5 MB is probably safe, you can usually get 200k more,
> but that's not always worth the experimenting.
In every case where I've met this problem, the BIOS has always grabbed
exactly the same amount of memory, namely one page (4k in each case).
As a result, if I'm setting up a machine with >64M or RAM, I now
automatically deduct 4k from the total amount of memory before
inserting the result in the append statement...
Using this method, the following should work on a 128M box...
Q> append="mem=131068k"
I will add that I have only dealt with i386 family machines to date,
so can't comment on the situation with Alpha's and the like that run
with >4k page sizes...
Best wishes from Riley.
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