Re: Reserving physical memory at boot time

[H. Peter Anvin]

Randy.Dunlap wrote:
> | 
> | Unfortunately last time I commented on this the response was roughly
> | "well, the patch already made it into Linus' kernel, it's too late to
> | fix it now."  That isn't exactly a very helpful response.
> 
> I don't see why it's too late.  How can it be too late?
> Ah, because it's already made it into 2.4?
> 

More because people don't want to fix their mistakes, I suspect :(

I don't know who originally started adding stuff to "mem=", but I still 
feel it needs to be backed out and renamed.

> | The mem= parameter has the semantic in the i386/PC boot protocol that
> | it specifies the top address of the usable memory region that begins
> | at 0x100000.  It's a bit of a wart that the boot loaders have to be
> | aware of this, but it's so and it's been so for a very long time.
> 
> So it's the top of the 0x100000-mem physical linear memory region
> (i.e., no gaps)?

Correct.