Re: Disable RAM

[bob@proulx.com (Bob Proulx)]

Tim Frink wrote:
> I want to test how a program would run with a reduced physical
> memory. The machine has currently 4 GB RAM running Debian. I'd
> like to evaluate the performance of the system with 2 GB physical
> RAM. Of course, I could remove on of the RAM modules. But, is
> there also a way to disable the physical memory by software?

At boot time specify the "mem=VALUE" parameter to the linux kernel.
This is easily done with grub at the grub boot screen by adding the
parameter to the end of the existing boot options.

  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686 root=/dev/hda5 ro mem=2G

Bob