On Sun, Mar 21, 2004 at 10:18:37PM -0500, Andrew Frezell wrote: > 1. Is there some way to protect the memory regions in RAM from linux > just trashing it? I saw a function add_memory_region in > arch/mips/kernel/setup.c that seems to do something, does anyone know > what exactly this does? The kernel won't touch any memory below the kernel itself. I consider that a bug so will change that for now that's a save region to place something. add_memory_region takes a third argument which can be BOOT_MEM_RAM, BOOT_MEM_ROM_DATA or BOOT_MEM_RESERVED. You should pass BOOT_MEM_RESERVED for to tell the kernel that a certain region should not be considered usable memory. For completeness sake BOOT_MEM_RAM is free memory and BOOT_MEM_ROM_DATA will be free at the end of kernel initialization so is usually used to describe free memory regions which hold firmware data that becomes useless after initialization. Ralf
