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from the 640k-is-more-memory-than-anyone-will-ever-need dept.
Linux x86/x86_64 Will Now Always Reserve The First 1MB Of RAM - Phoronix:
The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel code already had logic in place for reserving portions of the first 1MB of RAM to avoid the BIOS or kernel potentially clobbering that space among other reasons while now Linux 5.13 is doing away with that "wankery" and will just unconditionally always reserve the first 1MB of RAM.
[...] The motivation now for Linux 5.13 in getting that 1MB unconditional reservation in place for Linux x86/x86_64 stems from a bug report around an AMD Ryzen system being unbootable on Linux 5.13 since the change to consolidate their early memory reservations handling. Just unconditionally doing the first 1MB makes things much simpler to handle.
The change was sent in this morning as part of x86/urgent. "Do away with all the wankery of reserving X amount of memory in the first megabyte to prevent BIOS corrupting it and simply and unconditionally reserve the whole first megabyte."
no more wankery
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:44PM (3 children)
There was also a period where RAM was just plain *expensive*. The "correct" option to get the best performance out of your computer was to add as much RAM as possible, but that was infeasible due to the expense. So there were articles on getting a motherboard with a faster bus, faster-spinning hard drives, faster/multicore CPUs etc. to improve performance.
However, since RAM prices became a tenth or less what they used to be *and* Linux/Windows 7+ aggressively/opportunistically caches disk access in RAM, only a few motherboards can accommodate much more RAM and the shipped standard is something like 8GB (more like 16GB these days), when 24GB+ drastically improves (non-network) multiple-application responsiveness. People still ask me questions about DDR3 (?)vs DDR4 RAM, or whether they should get faster RAM, when based on my understanding the RAM speed is less important than having a lot of it to hold your whole application and much of your data memory-resident.
I guess most of these machines are spec'd for web browsing and gaming, but power users who might switch between a few apps for work -- e.g., Outlook, IDE, MS Teams, 20-tab-open browser running multiple heavyweight web apps, maybe a few MS-office type documents -- could probably benefit from maxing out RAM nowadays for maybe $300-$500. The speed and durability of solid-state drives make this somewhat less of an issue, but I found it odd that RAM used to be a big deal, and now that operating systems and power-user demands could benefit from that headroom, what seems to have been a holy grail/pipe-dream in the past seems to have dropped out of consideration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:33PM
RAM speed matters, the performance difference between generations here is significant. I'm also not sure many users could figure out how to use 8GB of RAM, let alone 16+, because the browser is the heaviest application in common use, and even chrome is fine with 4.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 07 2021, @12:51AM
That is also my experience. If all of your programs fit in memory, and stay there, even ancient PC-100 memory would be "fast enough". It's the constant swapping that wears away that last nerve.
As you note, SSD's have changed that to some extent. Still, a shortage of RAM is going to decrease the life of your SSD. Better to read the SSD once, commit to memory, then write back to the SSD when appropriate, than to read continuously from SSD.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @03:18AM
That's my experience too. 8GB is adequate, but same box with 32GB is night and day, and that's even when it's not being particularly exercised -- everything is just a whole lot snappier. And was the same with several different OSs. (Glad I got greedy and ran around filling up all my RAM capacity before the prices went stupid...)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.