RE: Memory corruption when running VMware. (was File curruption when running VMware)

["Hong-Gunn Chew" <hgchewML@optusnet.com.au>]

Hi Petr, Andrea,

Petr wrote:
>   So if you have >890MB of RAM and your kernel is compiled 
> with support for pte in high memory, please stop using 
> VMware, or reconfigure your 
> kernel to not use pte in high memory (4GB config without 
> pte-in-highmem is OK). Using pte-in-highmem with vmmon will 
> cause kernel oopses and/or 
> memory corruption :-(

I have been trying different kernel configurations to overcome this
problem.  I found that turning on APIC seem to work properly.  However
turning on IO-APIC causes it to hang just after X is started, which
seems to be during the startup of gdm.
I do have a silly question to ask though.  How do I compile the kernel
NOT to use pte in high memory?

Andrea wrote:
> passing to the kernel mem=850M in lilo at boot will be enough.

This did not work as it causes vmware to seg fault with a kernel oops:
	Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address
ffffe350
	 printing eip:
	f61ff30a
	*pde = 00001063
	*pte = 00000000
	Oops: 0000
	CPU:    0
	EIP:
0010:[nls_iso8859-1:__insmod_nls_iso8859-1_S.data_L2336+139562/11435686]
Tainted: PF
	EIP:    0010:[<f61ff30a>]    Tainted: PF
	EFLAGS: 00013286
	eax: ffffe350   ebx: e7652600   ecx: ffffe350   edx: 000000d0
	esi: e7652600   edi: 00000069   ebp: e7625de8   esp: e7625de8
	ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018
	Process vmware (pid: 2595, stackpage=e7625000)
	Stack: e7625e08 f61ff34d ffffe350 c02f8ee0 e7625e2c f5095a00
000000d0 e6d21000  
	       e7625eb8 f61ff41f e7652600 e7625e8d e7625e8e e7625e8f
e7625e40 00003286  
	       00003286 efe78d80 000001f0 00000000 e7589a80 c01e330f
000000bc 000001f0
	Call Trace:
[nls_iso8859-1:__insmod_nls_iso8859-1_S.data_L2336+139629/11435619]
[nls_iso8859-1:__insmod_nls_iso8859-1_S.data_L2336+139839/11435409]
[sys_sendmsg+303/480] [wait_for_buffers+86/144]
[nls_iso8859-1:__insmod_nls_iso8859-1_S.data_L2336+137406/11437842]
	Call Trace: [<f61ff34d>] [<f61ff41f>] [<c01e330f>] [<c0134a36>]
[<f61fea9e>]
	
[nls_iso8859-1:__insmod_nls_iso8859-1_S.data_L2336+132081/11443167]
[generic_file_readahead+288/304] [bounce_end_io_read+164/288]
[isapnp_set_mem+23/272] [vfs_link+23/256] [system_call+51/56]
	   [<f61fd5d1>] [<c01272b0>] [<c0131e94>] [<c01e0527>]
[<c013e487>]  [<c0106f0b>]
	
	Code: 8b 11 89 d0 25 00 07 01 00 3d 00 04 00 00 75 12 81 ca 00
00

Cheers,
Hong-Gunn