On 14 Nov 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
With LinuxBIOS in Flash rom it should be just as safe to make the F segment mapped to DRAM as it is in the DOC case. Until memory is setup we run out of the Rom chip but after that the two cases are effectively identical.
that's true in most cases. But on some systems (SBC 710) it will be required that we have a hole at 0xd0000, and I can imagine other badly designed hardware that will continue to require a gap at 0xf0000. In other words, the memory gap (or at least pieces of it) is not going away in all cases -- yet.
It would be nice to eliminate the memory hole, it has just not proven to be as easy to kill it as we hoped. So we will have to preserve the ability to operate with the memory hole in place and pointing to flash at 0xf0000, until we know for certain that for 100% of our platforms we can make that area covered by DRAM.
What this means is that the compressor can not be used for every platform.
I'm not even sure yet we can turn off the memory hole on the Geode chipset -- it's on the TODO list as of today.
thanks
ron