There are several classic problems related to memory on Linux
systems.
- 1) There are some buggy motherboards which cannot properly
- deal with the memory above 16MB. Consider exchanging
- your motherboard.
-
- 2) You cannot do DMA on the ISA bus to addresses above
- 16M. Most device drivers under Linux allow the use
- of bounce buffers which work around this problem. Drivers
- that don't use bounce buffers will be unstable with
- more than 16M installed. Drivers that use bounce buffers
- will be OK, but may have slightly higher overhead.
-
- 3) There are some motherboards that will not cache above
+ 1) There are some motherboards that will not cache above
a certain quantity of memory. If you have one of these
motherboards, your system will be SLOWER, not faster
as you add more memory. Consider exchanging your
If you use "mem=" on a machine with PCI, consider using "memmap=" to avoid
physical address space collisions.
-See the documentation of your boot loader (LILO, loadlin, etc.) about
+See the documentation of your boot loader (LILO, grub, loadlin, etc.) about
how to pass options to the kernel.
There are other memory problems which Linux cannot deal with. Random
with the vendor. Consider testing it with memtest86 yourself.
* Exchanging your CPU, cache, or motherboard for one that works.
-
- * Disabling the cache from the BIOS.
-
- * Try passing the "mem=4M" option to the kernel to limit
- Linux to using a very small amount of memory. Use "memmap="-option
- together with "mem=" on systems with PCI to avoid physical address
- space collisions.
-
-
-Other tricks:
-
- * Try passing the "no-387" option to the kernel to ignore
- a buggy FPU.
-
- * Try passing the "no-hlt" option to disable the potentially
- buggy HLT instruction in your CPU.