Sketch wrote:
>
> On Fri, 3 Dec 1999, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>
> > Finally I noted that I could boot the system with the linux-up kernel
> > (uniprocessor) after a clean install. I discovered further that the
> > kernel was only identifying the system as having 64 MB of memory instead
> > of the 384 MB it actually has. No problem, I added the usual append
> > line to lilo.conf and voila! The system would boot EITHER UP or SMP. A
> > bit disappointing to learn a) that even a driver-free SMP 2.2 kernel +
> > aic7xxx driver won't boot in at least this system with only 64 MB to
> > boot in -- have no idea where the failure lives, but it is most annoying
> > and occurs consistently with 2.2.5 (RH 6.0) 2.2.10 (homemade), 2.2.12
> > (RH 6.1) and 2.2.13 (homemade); and b) that 2.2 kernels still don't
> > autodetect memory on at least some systems that aren't THAT old.
>
> I have two Supermicro DBE (BX) boards at work with dual 400's, both with
> 256MB of RAM. One is running RH5.2 upgraded to 2.2.13 with software raid1
> on IDE, the other is a clean RH6.1 install with a Mylex DAC960. Both have
> 3c59x NICs, and neither will recognize more than 64MB of RAM.
>
> My guess is it's either an issue with recent Supermicro (SMP?) boards, or
> Redhat's LILO is broken and forces 64MB unless told otherwise. I have not
> used Redhat with 2.2 on any non-supermicro boards with more than 64MB of
> RAM, so I can't rule out the second possibility.
The problem has definitely nothing to do with SMP, I recently
experienced this on my old 486 with 96MB RAM.
Put in the file "/etc/lilo.conf" the following line:
append="mem=256M"
The whole thing is somehow strange: On some machines the whole memory is
detected and used without this parameter and on other systems it is not.
AFAIK the problem does not depend on LILO, it depends on the kernel
itself as this "append" parameter simply passes the "mem"-Variable to
the kernel. I think the whole thing has something to do with a backwards
compatibility issue.
To my mind the real bad thing about this problem is that for sure many
"Linux-newbies" do not check the memory usage and see their systems
swapping and slowing down and do not experience Linux as it could be.
Regards,
Hermann
--
Hermann Himmelbauer
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