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Date:      Mon, 3 Nov 1997 01:33:01 +0100 (CET)
From:      Mikael Karpberg <karpen@ocean.campus.luth.se>
To:        dg@root.com
Cc:        bugs@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 2.2.5 installation bug on 1gig machines
Message-ID:  <199711030033.BAA01264@ocean.campus.luth.se>
In-Reply-To: <199711010724.XAA28863@implode.root.com> from David Greenman at "Oct 31, 97 11:24:48 pm"

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According to David Greenman:
> >At 04:40 PM 10/31/97 -0800, David Greenman wrote:
> >>You'll
> >>have to physically pull out some of the memory and/or replace it with
> >>lower density SIMMs until you've finished the installation and built a
> >>customized kernel.
> >
> >Can the kernel know (or calculate) the maximum amount of memory it can 
> >use without crashing?  If so, it could refuse to register memory greater 
> >than that amount.
> 
>    Uh, well, the answer to this is that there is a bug in the kernel that is
> causing the problem. We didn't test kernel's with the BOUNCE_BUFFERS option
> on any large memory systems. Otherwise, how much memory a system has is not
> an issue with regard to the system crashing (resources allocated out of that
> memory can be a problem if tuned wrong, but that is a different issue).

I seem to remember some machines needing BOUNCE_BUFFERS at installation time
so that the option must be there, but why not compile the installation
boot disk's kernel with a small check that will simply "set" the memory to
say, min(REAL_MEMORY, 32MB) so that it will never seem to have more then
32 MB memory during installation? That shouldn't matter that much during
installation anyway, should it? 

  /Mikael



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