Douglas Mayne wrote:
> I use the grub loader, and I like it better than lilo. For me, the grub
> flexibility of grub means I would not switch back to lilo without a very
> good reason. Out of curiosity, what error messages did grub give with
> this setup? I have never used the vmalloc kernel option, and I don't know
> what it is for. I would assume that grub should ignore any parameters
> given as arguments on the "kernel" line, and simply feed them directly to
> the kernel when control is transferred. Then again, I only have standard
> hardware, and using less than the normal maximum amount of RAM for 32-bit
> architecture.

I do not quite remember the exact error logs I was getting, but while
searching for on-line help somebody at lkml.org kindly pointed me to
the following 2 links:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/4/283
http://lists.linbit.com/pipermail/dr...il/002890.html

In these links (or at least in one of them) they talk about 'tricking'
the grub with the 'uppermem' parameter. However, that trick did not
work for me. I suppose that it did not work for me due to my specific
hardware configuration. My machine has 2G bytes of ram and I boot with
the following related params:

vmalloc=384M mem=1771M

That is, I'm reserving the top ~256MB for my application, and I have
increased the default size of VmallocTotal from the default 128MB to
128+256=384MB as to not interfere when I do ioremap the top 256MB of
memory.

>
> Are you using any special disk contollers? I have heard of a case with the
> reiserfs where the filesystem module binds to disk the controllers that
> are present when the module loads. Maybe, ext3 is similar.
>

Not really, I have only one disk and it is an ide disk.

>
> It sounds like your box is using a lot of RAM? Is that what the
> vmalloc option is for? If you give more information about your hardware,
> then that might helpful in narrowing the issue.

I guess my comment above should clarify this point.

Rodrigo