Hello, Jeff!
> Can anyone explain to me why the system boots with 128MB of RAM with
> lilo and only 64MB with grub? Everything seems to work fine when I
> specify mem=128m, but that's still strange.
GRUB itself determines the memory size. If it boots Linux it always gives
the "mem=" parameter to the kernel.
I can understand why GRUB does it. If a bootloader can determine a
parameter that is used by the OS, why not give this data to the kernel?
The problem is, however, that because of complexity and sometimes
brokenness of todays hardware, GRUB has hard time competing with an OS
that has its own 16-bit startup code and is designed to determine hardware
configuration without helpful hints from bootloaders.
The comment in boot.c says:
/* Help Linux to find memory only if more than 64MB are present.
Up to that amount it is fairly capable to find by itself,
and at least newer Phoenix BIOSes are known to put a
10k hole just before 64MB, but report a proper total. */
I propose to remove that comment and "if" immediately below.
Patch and ChangeLog available by request :-)
Regards,
Pavel Roskin
