DIMM relocation on Tyan S2885

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Sun Jan 11 19:45:00 CET 2004


Matt Harvey <m.j.harvey at ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> Hello,
> 
> I have an Opteron machine based on the Tyan K8W S2885 mainboard which is
> equipped with 8GB of RAM (8x1GB DIMM). The BIOS is mapping  the PCI/AGP
> devices into the address space immediately below 4GB and so
> consequently, I am losing access to nearly an entire 1GB of RAM. I've
> spoken to Tyan about this and they acknowledged that it it is principle
> possible for the BIOS to remap the DIMM presently located at 3GB to 9GB
> but that they have no intention of including this option in their BIOS
> as it "penalizes 32-bit OS's that cannot use more than 4GB." 
> 
> So the question to the panel is: Will LinuxBIOS solve this problem for
> me?  The task this machine was purchased for really does require as much
> RAM as possible.

At the present moment that is not implemented by LinuxBIOS.  It is
something I would like to work on, but it has not been a priority yet.
I think I could do it a day or two a week with testing etc.

There are a couple of ways LinuxBIOS could solve this problem.

1) You have the code so you can implement that, so you are not helpless.
2) You can wait until I get around to implementing for other reasons.
3) You can pay one of the vendors doing LinuxBIOS to fix it for you.
   <plug> Linux Networx </plug>

Eric



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