Reserve memory from the command line

Reserve memory from the command line

[Steven Rostedt]

Hi,

Today I just discoved that my Toshiba laptop has a small bit of bad 
memory.  So I went on looking for a way to reserve the memory area from 
the command line, because I run several kernels for various reasons and 
that it would be easiest to just modify lilo.conf.

After seaching the web and scanning the source code I realize that there 
are only patches to do this and not in the vanilla kernel.  I was 
wondering why such a usefull feature is not in the kernel?

I'm using kernel versions 2.4.7 to 2.4.18 and didn't want to go patching 
each one.  I'll probably just hardcode the bad memory as reserved and be 
done with it.

Is this feature planned on becoming part of the kernel, at least as a 
config option, and if not, then why not?

If it is already there, and I missed it, please let me know.

Thanks,

Steven Rostedt

Re: Reserve memory from the command line

[Kasper Dupont]

Steven Rostedt wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Today I just discoved that my Toshiba laptop has a small bit of bad
> memory.  So I went on looking for a way to reserve the memory area from
> the command line, because I run several kernels for various reasons and
> that it would be easiest to just modify lilo.conf.
> 
> After seaching the web and scanning the source code I realize that there
> are only patches to do this and not in the vanilla kernel.  I was
> wondering why such a usefull feature is not in the kernel?
> 
> I'm using kernel versions 2.4.7 to 2.4.18 and didn't want to go patching
> each one.  I'll probably just hardcode the bad memory as reserved and be
> done with it.
> 
> Is this feature planned on becoming part of the kernel, at least as a
> config option, and if not, then why not?
> 
> If it is already there, and I missed it, please let me know.

I couldn't find it in the Documentation directory, but there
is a comment about it in linux/arch/i386/kernel/setup.c

                /*
                 * "mem=nopentium" disables the 4MB page tables.
                 * "mem=XXX[kKmM]" defines a memory region from HIGH_MEM
                 * to <mem>, overriding the bios size.
                 * "mem=XXX[KkmM]@XXX[KkmM]" defines a memory region from
                 * <start> to <start>+<mem>, overriding the bios size.
                 */

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