On Sun, Jun 08, 2003 at 09:58:56AM +0930, tim truman wrote: > A while ago I compiled a new kernel and when booting it for the first > time got the error message EBDA too big. This I resolved according to > bug report 106898 by editing /usr/share/misc/magic.Now this error > message has returned and the magic file is correct as far as the bug fix > is concerned. Any ideas? even the definition of EBDA would be helpful as > it might point me in the right direction. EBDA is the Extended BIOS Data Area. From what I can gather from $KERNEL_DOC/i386/boot.txt, there is an area of memory reserved for it. An exerpt from part of the aforementioned boot.txt: It is desirable to keep the "memory ceiling" -- the highest point in low memory touched by the boot loader -- as low as possible, since some newer BIOSes have begun to allocate some rather large amounts of memory, called the Extended BIOS Data Area, near the top of low memory. The boot loader should use the "INT 12h" BIOS call to verify how much low memory is available. Unfortunately, if INT 12h reports that the amount of memory is too low, there is usually nothing the boot loader can do but to report an error to the user. The boot loader should therefore be designed to take up as little space in low memory as it reasonably can. For zImage or old bzImage kernels, which need data written into the 0x90000 segment, the boot loader should make sure not to use memory above the 0x9A000 point; too many BIOSes will break above that point. -- Seneca seneca-cunningham@rogers.com
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