Re: AGP aperture beyond 4GB not valid?

Previous thread: Re: HPET regression in 2.6.26 versus 2.6.25 -- experimental revert for 2.6.27 failed by David Witbrodt on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 9:17 pm. (2 messages)

Next thread: [PATCH] vmscan: set try_to_release_page's gfp_mask to 0 by Hisashi Hifumi on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 10:21 pm. (7 messages)
To: <linux-kernel@...>
Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 9:32 pm

I have an MSI K9A Platinum motherboard (AMD CrossFire 580X and SB600
chipset) with 4G RAM, and I'm running Fedora 9 (x86_64) with kernel
2.6.25.11-97.fc9.x86_64. When I boot, I see the following go by:

Checking aperture...
Node 0: aperture @ 1006000000 size 32 MB
Aperture beyond 4GB. Ignoring.
No AGP bridge found
Your BIOS doesn't leave a aperture memory hole
Please enable the IOMMU option in the BIOS setup
This costs you 64 MB of RAM
Mapping aperture over 65536 KB of RAM @ c000000
PM: Registered nosave memory: 000000000c000000 - 0000000010000000

My BIOS doesn't have an IOMMU option (latest BIOS available for the
mboard). However, it appears that an aperture is allocated but the
kernel then ignores it due to where it is placed. Why?

Is there anything I can or should do about this (what impact does this
really have)?

--
Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
--

To: Chris Adams <cmadams@...>
Cc: <linux-kernel@...>
Date: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 - 2:01 am

You can't use it as an IOMMU to handle 32-bit devices, since it's above
the 32-bit addressible region. Hence the kernel doesn't use it.

-hpa
--

To: Chris Adams <cmadams@...>
Cc: <linux-kernel@...>
Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 10:38 pm

32MB is normally not a useful aperture. Likely it's some garbage

It will eat your babies. No really except for some lost RAM nothing.

-Andi

--

Previous thread: Re: HPET regression in 2.6.26 versus 2.6.25 -- experimental revert for 2.6.27 failed by David Witbrodt on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 9:17 pm. (2 messages)

Next thread: [PATCH] vmscan: set try_to_release_page's gfp_mask to 0 by Hisashi Hifumi on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - 10:21 pm. (7 messages)