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To: Tony Overfield <tony@dell.com>
cc: bugs@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, elh@svic.com
Subject: Re: 2.2.5 installation bug on 1gig machines 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 31 Oct 1997 22:54:37 CST."
             <3.0.3.32.19971031225437.006d6490@bugs.us.dell.com> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 23:24:48 -0800
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>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).

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project