Hi everybody. This patch fixes the Ok, booting the kernel. [hangs] problem with BIOSes that report E820 memory maps with zero-size entries. Among the mainboards affected are EPOX 4G4A+ (presumably) EPOX 4BEA[-R] Chaintech 9EJL . In the past (kernels up to 2.4.20), these mainboards could only boot Linux with explicit 'mem=' boot parameters. Up to 2.4.20, a zero-size E820 memory region (eg 0xa0000 - 0xa0000) reported by the BIOS causes 'sanitize_e820_map' to take the end of this region as the start of another region, producing two overlapping regions extending to the end of addressable memory. If the zero-size region is of a higher type than 'usable RAM' (eg 'reserved'), this causes all memory above the zero-size region to be marked unusable (leaving 640k as of the above example -- the kernel fails to start at all). The patch adds code to remove empty entries before sorting regions. It was generated for a 2.4.20 kernel. Best regards, Alex [ Please send answers to my Reply-To address. I'm not subscribed to the kernel mailing list. ]