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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: 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.