vesafb and too much RAM?

I was running debian with a 2.4.20(-3 I believe) with vesafb with no
problems with 512MB ram. I upgraded to 1GB and immediately I could not
boot. I get as far as the LILO prompt, but as soon as I hit enter the
screen goes black, the caps lock and scroll lock keyboard LEDs flash, and
nothing save hitting the reset switch has any affect.

I can append 'mem=768M' to the kernel command line and everything boots
like normal except of course that then it think I have only 768MB RAM. If
I tell the kernel not to use vesafb by removing the 'vga=' line in my
lilo.conf then everything boot fine and my RAM is recognized.

I also have a second install of debian with kernel 2.4.19 on the same
machine. With this kernel it actually boots, however the screen stays
black. I can log in blindly and issue commands and dmesg reported the
following:

"vesafb: abort, cannot ioremap video memory 0x8000000 @ 0xd8000000"

This kernel also behaves normally if I specify 'mem=768M' on the kernel
command line or if I specify vga=normal (overriding my normal vga=792 from
lilo.conf). With 'mem=768M' set dmesg shows:

 vesafb: framebuffer at 0xd8000000, mapped to 0xf080e000, size 131072k
 vesafb: mode is 1024x768x32, linelength=4096, pages=1
 vesafb: protected mode interface info at c000:e350
 vesafb: scrolling: redraw
 vesafb: directcolor: size=8:8:8:8, shift=24:16:8:0
 Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 128x48
 fb0: VESA VGA frame buffer device

with 2.4.20 and 'mem=768M'

 vesafb: framebuffer at 0xd8000000, mapped to 0xf0800000, size 131072k
 vesafb: mode is 1024x768x32, linelength=4096, pages=1
 vesafb: protected mode interface info at c000:e350
 vesafb: scrolling: redraw
 vesafb: directcolor: size=8:8:8:8, shift=24:16:8:0
 Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 128x48
 fb0: VESA VGA frame buffer device

In testing I have found that I can go as high as 'mem=880M' with no
problem but 'mem=881M' ends in the same results as described above.

I don't know if this is a bug or something I may have overlooked or failed
to do. Hope someone can understand whats happening.

Thanks and regards,
Matt N.



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I was running debian with a 2.4.20(-3 I believe) with vesafb with no
problems with 512MB ram. I upgraded to 1GB and immediately I could not
boot. I get as far as the LILO prompt, but as soon as I hit enter the
screen goes black, the caps lock and scroll lock keyboard LEDs flash, and
nothing save hitting the reset switch has any affect.

You have lots oe memory. Try turning on high memory support. This will 
make the problem go away.



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SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See!
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I guess I shouild have mentioned that this was the first thing I tried. My
kernel is compiled with support for 4GB of memory.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Matt N.

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, James Simmons wrote:

quoted

I was running debian with a 2.4.20(-3 I believe) with vesafb with no
problems with 512MB ram. I upgraded to 1GB and immediately I could not
boot. I get as far as the LILO prompt, but as soon as I hit enter the
screen goes black, the caps lock and scroll lock keyboard LEDs flash, and
nothing save hitting the reset switch has any affect.

You have lots oe memory. Try turning on high memory support. This will
make the problem go away.

-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.NET email is sponsored by:
SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See!
http://www.vasoftware.com

I guess I shouild have mentioned that this was the first thing I tried. My
kernel is compiled with support for 4GB of memory.

Any other ideas?

Do you have ACPI turned on? If you do try turning it off.




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This SF.NET email is sponsored by:
SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See!
http://www.vasoftware.com