Appendix 7: Arguments

253

argument list would look like:

reserve= 0x300,32 foo=0x300

This will keep all other device drivers from probing 0x300

while allowing the drive that uses that port to be properly

initialized.

ramdisk=

This argument tells the kernel how big a ramdisk to cre 

ate. To put a file system from a floppy into a ramdisk

would require an argument like: ramdisk=1440. Note

that the units of size for this argument is kilobytes. This

is one of the few parameters that can be set in the kernel

using rdev.

mem= Since the BIOS of most PCs can only report 64 MB there

are times when the kernel needs to be told that there is

more memory than this. This argument should be used

with great care, since, if you lie to the kernel and tell

it that it has more address space than it actually has,

the system will crash miserably at some time in the near

future. Also make sure that your system does not use the

highest memory for caching the BIOS code, as use of this

memory by the kernel will ultimately crash the system as

well. The value given after the equal sign should be the

highest ram address available to the kernel, so a 96 MB

system would get an argument like `mem=0x6000000'.