I have a patch that reworks the memory calculation at bootup, and correctly obtains the physical memory map from the BIOS using the INT 15, AX=E820 call. This should allow correct operation on machines which reserve certain segments of memory for non-OS use (ThinkPads). It can also preserve the ACPI tables for later use.
If 15/E820 is not supported, various other methods are tried, including falling back to the current scheme of speculative probing. I'd like some testers (preferrably a ThinkPad user with > 64M of memory) to try this out and see if it correctly detects all usable memory; and also if the system boots without needing to specify MAXMEM (or npx0 size). If it works, great. If not, boot with `-v', and send me back the SMAP lines from the dmesg output. Barring any serious objections(*), I'd like to merge this into -current, and then `unifdef -DVM86' to make it mandatory. There appears to be no other reliable way to detect > 64M of memory on modern PC hardware. PC98 developers - this should actually simplify things, as it moves the memory calculations into their own routine. The -current patch is ftp://sumatra.americantv.com/pub/memsize.patch There is a bootable -stable picobsd floppy too, for those who don't want to compile a kernel: ftp://sumatra.americantv.com/pub/picobsd.bin -- Jonathan (*) I don't consider FBSDBOOT.EXE a serious objection; it may or may not have worked before, and it may or may not work now. (As discussed to death on earlier threads on this list). To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
