Re: Large ramdisks, kernel memory space issue

[salman h <salman_debian@yahoo.com>]

--- Goswin von Brederlow
<brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> wrote:
> salman h <salman_debian@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I'm using a slightly modified Debian kernel along
> with
> > PXELinux to boot a machine over the network. 
> >
> > My kernel's memory footprint is quite large (400
> megs)
> > because it pre-allocates memory for some processes
> (in
> > the interest of speedier process execution).
> >
> > My ramdisk size is about 500 megs.
> >
> > Now, the ramdisk has to fit in the lower 1 Gig of
> > memory which the kernel can access. So a ramdisk
> > bigger than 500 megs cannot be loaded by the
> kernel,
> > since the ramdisk would exceed the 1 Gig kernel
> memory
> > space bound.
> >
> > My question: Is there an easy way make the Linux
> > kernel be able to access the entire memory space?
> This
> > way I can easily load larger ramdisks on my target
> > machines which have 2 Gigs of physical memory.
> >
> > Thanks, 
> >
> > Salman
> 
> Just a thought but why not load the ramdisk
> yourself.
> 
> Write a small initrd that sets up large ramdisk and
> downloads an image
> from the network.
> 
> MfG
>         Goswin

There's no reason why that would not work. Except the
constraints of my problem are such that I may not
always have the network available for downloading a
second ramdisk.

I realize I mentioned PXELinux and network booting
earlier. But let us say I was using ISOLinux for CD
booting without network connectivity.

I suppose I could store the second ramdisk on the CD
and mount it from there during init. So that would
work as well. It looks like the best solution right
now.

Thanks for you help.

Salman

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