Re: Kernel Upgrade and strange RAM problem.

["SN_Diamond" <Norman.Diamond@example.com>]

Venkatesh Raghavan wrote:

> My system has 1GB RAM and the ML7.2 boot shows
> 1024 MB RAM at the login screen (as below)
> However the ML8.0 boot shows only 1005MB RAM at the
> login screen (as below)

Your quotation of the ML8.0 boot showed a strange-looking error message
concerning a RAM disk.  My completely novice, intuitive guess about this is
that the RAM disk driver reserved some memory (maybe 16MB) and then the
kernel tried but failed to change the memory mapping.  My completely novice,
intuitive guess is that this looks like a bug in at least one of these
components.

If the kernel changed its opinion on whether to count portions of megabytes
(i.e. the part of the lowest megabyte that isn't occupied by BIOS ROM and
stone age video buffers, and the part of the highest megabyte that's
occupied by ACPI data) then maybe 1 or 2 MB also get subtracted.  This still
leaves a small discrepancy.

> What "BIOS-provided physical RAM map" mean?

When the PC is first powered up, the BIOS does a limited amount of testing
and detection of devices and reading the partition table on the first hard
disk, etc.  Later, the BIOS provides information to the OS (and directly to
application programs if the OS is sufficiently primitive) about the
observations the BIOS made.