I don't know of such a patch, but it should be possible to use the extra memory
as swap space, even if it's not usable directly. This is also useful for people
with broken motherboards where the L2 cache doesn't cache more than the first
64/512 Mb of RAM, making the remainder unusable as general-purpose memory.
There was a driver at one point which offered the extra physical memory as a
block device, which could then be used as swap. I can't remember where the
original was, but there's one included as a simple test driver for my MTD
subsystem.
If this was extended to handle the fact that the memory isn't just accessed by
phystovirt(xxx), but has to be specifically accessed through vm tricks, then
it should theoretically be able to handle up to 4Gb of physical memory, or
however much the x86 chips can physically address.
This is far from an ideal solution, but it will at least offer some way of
using the extra memory until a better alternative is produced.
---- ---- ----
David Woodhouse, Robinson College, CB3 9AN, England. (+44) 0976 658355
Dave@imladris.demon.co.uk http://dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk
finger pgp@dwmw2.robinson.cam.ac.uk for PGP key.
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