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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: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday June 09 2021, @02:43AM
Thank you so much. Very interesting perspective. It's interesting that you feel "fooled". I've found Alpine to be so good, stable, fast, efficient, that for me, it's the standard of excellence. But I understand what you mean. It's certainly a learning (eye-opening) experience.
Again, I have not tried to run any apps outside of what you can get from Alpine.
But I've had your problem with many applications for many distros, and I'm trying to think about what I've done with other distros. I think I usually get the distro-specific apps. If I need something that isn't available for the OS platform, I've probably gotten source and compiled. But that doesn't always work, and although I've done some SW development, I usually don't have the patience to figure it out and fix it. All depends on what the bug is, of course.