Re: problem with grub configuration

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2002-02-08 at 15:21, address@hidden wrote:
> Pavel Roskin <address@hidden> wrote:
> > GRUB loads initrd (initial reamdisk) to the end of the memory.  It uses
> > 256M of memory.  But you tell the kernel that you only have 254M of
> > memory.  That's why the kernel cannot load initrd.
> > 
> > initrd is used on RedHat to support SCSI adaptors.  If it cannot be 
> > loaded, then your SCSI devices are not accessible.
> > 
> > The best solution would be to recompile the kernel to support your SCSI 
> > adaptor in the kernel.  Besides, your kernel is old - consider applying 
> > all RedHat updates.
> 
> Actually, an easier solution is to, instead of adding the "mem=254M"
> to the end of the kernel command-line, tell GRUB that it has less memory
> to work with, and it will report that to the kernel.
> 
> Do this with the "uppermem" command, so instead of your entry looking
> like the following:
[snip] 
> ...so I *think* it would instead look like this:
> 
> title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10smp)
>         uppermem 259072
>         root (hd0,0)
>         kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10smp ro root=/dev/sda1
>         initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.7-10smp.img

You also still need to pass mem= on the kernel command line if you go
this route.  Having grub pass its detected memory to the kernel by
default with a 2.4 kernel leads to problems due to not taking into
account any holes which you may have in your memory layout, thus is
disabled in the Red Hat Linux packages.

Cheers,

Jeremy