kernel panic when "append mem="256M" " is added to lilo.conf

[Prabhu Ramachandran <prabhu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

hi,

>>>>> "kamesh" == kamesh jayachandran <kameshj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

    kamesh> Hello Luggies, I got struck with the problem with the huge
    kamesh> amount of RAM.  I have 256MB RAM and 850MB of swapB.But
    kamesh> the kernel version 2.2 and above does not recognize the
    kamesh> RAM of size more than 64MB.So according to some advice

This is actually a bios problem (the original bios was desgined to
report upto only 64M) maybe newer kernels circumvent this.

There is a quote from Linus in the bootprompt howto.

  ``The kernel will accept any `mem=xx' parameter you give it, and if it
  turns out that you lied to it, it will crash horribly sooner or later.
  The parameter indicates the highest addressable RAM address, so
  `mem=0x1000000' means you have 16MB of memory, for example.  For a
  96MB machine this would be `mem=0x6000000'.  If you tell Linux that it
  has more memory than it actually does have, bad things will happen:
  maybe not at once, but surely eventually.''

Basically, you need to specify the correct amount of RAM.  Confusingly
in the SMP howto it says

     If you have more than 64 MB of memory in the machine, and you
     specified the exact number manually in the LILO configuration, you
     should specify one MB less than you actually have in the machine.
     If you have 128 MB, you lilo.conf line looks like:
     append="mem=127M"

So try with append="mem=255M" and see if it works ok.

    kamesh> here----------------> boot=/dev/hda map=/boot/map
    kamesh> install=/boot/boot.b prompt timeout=50 linear default=dos
    kamesh> append = "mem=256M" image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14-12

Your lilo.conf looks ok.

prabhu
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