Re: Large ramdisks, kernel memory space issue

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

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