Re: Making Debian Recognize 256 Meg of Ram

[Neale Banks <neale@lowendale.com.au>]

On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Chris Wagner wrote:

> LOL!  Oh, like trying to write to a non-existent memory location? :)

Exactly ;-)  First a cute quote:

-----------------------------------8<-----------------------------------
When solving a "panic" you must first ask yourself what you were
doing that could possibly frighten an operating system.
... P. van der Linden <linden@positive.eng.sun.com>
        and his uncustomary theories.
-----------------------------------8<-----------------------------------

I can well imagine that finding a lack of RAM at a location where you
solemnley promised it some could indeed frighten a Linux kernel.

More relevantly, the Bootprompt-HOWTO quotes Linus:

-----------------------------------8<-----------------------------------
"The kernel will accept any `mem=xx' parameter you give it, and if it
turns out that you lied to it, it will crash horribly sooner or later.  
[...] If you tell Linux that it has more memory than it actually does
have, bad things will happen: maybe not at once, but surely eventually."
-----------------------------------8<-----------------------------------

I've never tried such lies myself ;-)

Neale.