Re: 2GB physical memory on an Intel/Linux box

Geert Uytterhoeven (Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)
Mon, 9 Mar 1998 17:22:24 +0100 (CET)


On Mon, 9 Mar 1998, David Woodhouse wrote:
> edo@eosys.com said:
> > Does there exist a patch for 2.0.33 that will permit the use of
> > 2GB of physical memory? We have been able to get ~768MB so far.
> > While I found a discussion of this issue in the Linux-Kernel
> > mailing list archives of last July, there was only a hint of a patch.
>
> 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.

On Linux/m68k (Amiga), we have the z2ram block device, which allows to use the
slow 16 bit Zorro II RAM as swapspace.

Greetings,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven                     Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be
Wavelets, Linux/{m68k~Amiga,PPC~CHRP}  http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/
Department of Computer Science -- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven -- Belgium

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