Re: aac & PAE not happy in -current

On Mar 25, 2007, at 11:30 AM, Scott Long wrote:

> Kevin Day wrote:
>> Okay, after spending the better part of the weekend trying to  
>> figure out how to PXE boot the floppies that Dell gives you (using  
>> their own version of DOS), I've upgraded to the very latest system  
>> BIOS, controller firmware and kernel, and it's still requesting  
>> 128MB of memory. Nothing seems to have changed really.
>> Any other suggestions? Booting into Linux seems to show that it's  
>> also eating 128MB of memory space there, so it's nothing FreeBSD  
>> is doing to cause this.
>> Does your controller have the 128MB dimm for caching? I still  
>> can't see why they'd expose that to the host, but it's my only  
>> theory at the moment.
>
> Sorry for the confusion, it turns out that my math was wrong and my
> machine is mapping all of the DIMM space as well, though it's not  
> 128MB.
> Exposing the full DIMM size to the host is really just an act of
> laziness on the part of the firmware engineers; it's convenient for
> debugging the firmware and doing other development tasks, but it's not
> useful for anything else.  So, we're left with figuring out  
> workarounds.
> I'm not sure if the driver can force less of the space to be mapped,
> I'll look into that.  The other workaround is to change  
> VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX
> in /sys/i386/include/vmparam.h to a larger value, but probably no more
> than around 500.


Okay, I tried:

400 - no difference
500 - Gets further into the boot, but runs out when it tries to exec  
init(?)
550 - aac0 complains "Not enough contiguous memory available", then  
the next PCI device that tries to run can't alloc anything
600 - back to what was happening at 400, aac0 can't alloc enough  
kernel virtual memory

Any other suggestions?

-- Kevin