Dear All,
can anyone help/put me straight on this.
I have a i486 machine running Slackware 8.1. As a christmas present I bought
it a 32MB Simm, it currently has 16MB installed (one module). When I
replaced the 16MB with the 32MB the bios still only detects 16MB on boot and
everything runs as before. No matter I thought - I have read somewhere that
Linux will override such settings, but I have been unable to get the kernel
(2.4.18) to do so.
I read the lilo.conf man page which indicated that adding 'append="mem=32M"'
to lilo would do it, but the computer would not boot after adding this. A
further search of the internet produced a sort of How-to doc that lists
three options (but I think is written for RedHat). The first of these is the
same as the lilo.conf recommendation, the second involves giving mem sizes
and start locations in hexadecimals e.g.
append="mem=exactmap mem=0x9f000@0 mem=0x1f00000@100000" and the third is
like the 2nd, but in english..
append="mem=exactmap mem#=640K@0 mem=31M@1M"
all these end in the same result - failure to boot. I have tried these
messages specifying 16MB as the memory size (incase there really was a
problem with the 32MB size) but the result is the same.
In the mini how-to it is suggested that white space is needed between the
start quotes and the first mem statement - but that doesn't resolve this
problem either.
So - am I correct in assuming that the Linux kernel can use this additional
16MB of memory , and if so how do I let it know its there?
all the best
Glen