From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: hardware = dell poweredge 2450 w/2gb memory. normal kernel installation procedure for us is to use a initrd so that the scsi & raid modules may be loaded for the root fs. recompiled kernel 2.2.19-6.2.1 from the source rpm via rpm --target=i686 -bb kernel-2.2.spec with CONFIG_2GB=y (turned off CONFIG_1GB) and installed with an initrd and lilo. boot fails saying "initrd overwritten (0x8??????? < 0x8???????) disabling it. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: recompile kernel with CONFIG_2GB and try to boot with an initrd via lilo. Additional info:
the actual addresses are (0x80f8e000 < 0x8127f000). the code which prints this error message is in linux/init/main.c.
What bootloader (lilo?) and what version are you using ? Why do you want CONFIG_2Gb ?
- as mentioned above i am using lilo (lilo-0.21-15) - i want config_2gb because i have 2gb of memory in the machine.
For the RH kernel, you don't need CONFIG_2GB for accessing that memory.
apparently i do. running the stock kernel-smp-2.2.19 causes linux to only use 1GB of physical memory. the limitation is due to the way the 32-bit address space is divided: 1GB kernel and 3GB user space. the kernel can only manage up to 1GB in this configuration. turning on CONFIG_2GB paritions the address space into 2GB/2GB.
For > 1Gb systems, running the enterprise kernel is recommended...
right. i was able to boot to the enterprise kernel and have the full 2GB recognized. the problem is that we've seen incompatiblities with the LFS patch which is also part of the enterprise kernel. specifically, we run IBM DB2 apparently does not go through QA under the "enterprise" kernel.
Ok, I see your point. I think you need to apply the "linux-2.2.16-bigmem-initrd" patch to your "non-enterprise" kernel. It is supposed to take care of initrd vs > 1Gb. The patch can be found in the src.rpm for the kernel, just "rpm -i" it and the patches are in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
is there any way to have future versions of kernel-smp "work" when the CONFIG_2GB flag is on? it's much more maintainable for me to only have to turn on a flag in the .config versus editing the .spec file to apply a patch for each kernel release. thanks.
If the patch worked for you (please confirm), I'll make this patch always apply for newer versions.