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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, Insightful) by VLM on Monday June 07 2021, @12:04PM (1 child)
I downloaded the SLS floppy disk set from a local BBS in the fall of 93 and booted linux on a 40 mhz 386 with 4 megs ram as a student.
Kernel compilation required a bit more than 4 megs so with swapping it took like an hour to compile the kernel. So my board had 8 memory slots (back when you had to use four 8-bit simms to get 32 bits wide) so I stuck some old 256K simms in the empty slots giving me 5 megs and kernel compile times dropped to something like 15 minutes due to much less swapping.
Anyway back in the old days of linux even one meg counted and was important.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 07 2021, @03:11PM
I think my first install was Slackware (no idea which version) from CD Roms around-about 95/96. I remember that it would boot up once, into a graphical desktop, and connect to our dialup ISP, run Mozilla, and browse the 35 or so available websites at the time ;-) Yes, there were more than that, but anyway... the real kicker was: on 2nd boot, Slackware wouldn't do the SLIP/PPP or whatever it was thing anymore. I spent about 6 days across the span of 3 months trying to get it to go, read all the available help, reinstalled from scratch, and each time it would work on first boot and never again. At which point I filed this "Linux thing" under: Not ready for prime time, and didn't revisit it until MinGW in ~2002, Gentoo in ~2005 (the only true 64 bit OS available at the time), and by 2007 I had migrated to Ubuntu as my home desktop which it has been ever since. Managed to make Ubuntu my work desktop around 2013, and now that's my niche in a team of 80% Windrones.
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