Bug 65187

Summary:	Installer crashes if trying to use more than 16MB of ram.
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Andrei Ignat <q>
Component:	installer	Assignee:	Jeremy Katz <katzj>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	7.3
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i586
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2002-05-20 18:49:21 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Andrei Ignat 2002-05-19 19:05:11 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461)

Description of problem:
I just got my hands on a old Compaq Prosignia 300 and I'm trying to install 
RedHat 7.3. The computer is built on the EISA platform and reports only 16MB 
to the ISA command, as originally specified.

It has 16MB onboard and the installer gets to the point where it says I don't 
have enough memory. I tried installing another 32MB and 24MB and entered 

linux mem=32M
and
linux mem24M

The installer crashes when it tryes to create a RAM disk. The following is the 
error message:

ext2-fs: unable to read superblock
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=09:00, iso_blknum=16, block=32
Kernel panic: VFS Unable to mount root fs on 09:00

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
See above.

Additional info:

I've tryed Mandrake 8.2 and experienced no problems.

Comment 1 Andrei Ignat 2002-05-19 21:19:03 UTC

Ok, I fixed it.

Because RedHat 7.3 runs kernel 2.4.x I had to use a diffrent syntax than the 
one on the F3 help page.

Instead of: mem=24M
I wrote:    mem=exactmap mem=640K@0 mem=23M@1M

This worked. The bootdisk and affected documentation should be changed.

Comment 2 Michael Fulbright 2002-05-20 18:49:15 UTC

Jeremy do you see any problem having docs change this?

Comment 3 Jeremy Katz 2002-05-30 20:29:11 UTC

These specific Compaqs are weird... most hardware can have memory specified with
mem=48M or whatever normally without problems.  If you use the exactmap syntax,
you have to specify holes as well, which cause more problems on most more modern
hardware.

Comment 4 Michael Fulbright 2002-12-20 17:38:25 UTC

Time tracking values updated