On Tue, 16 Jan 2001, Ralf Baechle wrote: > Don't use mem= on an ARC machine. The ARC firmware provides a usable way > to detect the installed amount of memory including memory used internally > by the firmware. If you use mem= on an ARC machine you'll simply make > the kernel stomp over all this firmwar data with more or less random > results. Ralf, please do not depreciate the tool. You should not use "mem=" blindly on any kind of machine or bad things will happen. Whenever you use "mem=", you need to have at least a bare idea which memory areas are usable and which are not. You wouldn't like to put a process in framebuffer memory, for example, would you? When used carefully "mem=" may be a valuable tool for development and debugging. It's flexible enough to specify multiple memory ranges and you may use decimal, octal and hexadecimal notation, as well as suffixes for kilo and mega (or kibi and mebi, actually). It may be used as a workaround for unsupported memory configurations or broken memory areas. That written, one wouldn't normally use "mem=" for a production system, of course. Maciej -- + Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland + +--------------------------------------------------------------+ + e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +
