Subject: Understanding 'bootmem'.

From: "Steven J. Hill" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 08:49:22 -0500

I am trying to better understand 'bootmem'. From the comments in the file
'mm/bootmem.c', it appears that bootmem is used in dealing with reserved
system memory and holes. Essentially, does the bootmem family of functions
deal with systems where all RAM is not contiguous? It also seems
to prevent allocation of memory that is being used by the INITRD if the
kernel is configured for one. Is there any additional funcionality of the
'bootmem' stuff that I am missing?

Also, with respect to the 'meminfo' structure defined in 'setup.h'. When
we speak of NR_BANKS which I assumed stands for "number of RAM banks", are
we talking about physical memory devices (chips) or the number of regions
in the memory map where RAM is located? In my case of the LinkUpSys
L7200SDB, I only have RAM located at physical address 0xf0000000 and it is
a contiguous 32MB region. I would therefore have 'meminfo.nr_banks = 1' and
'meminfo.bank[0].size = 32*1024*1024'. Am I understanding this properly?
Thanks.

-Steve

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 Steven J. Hill - Embedded SW Engineer
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