Severity: important Regret to report another, quite modern, non-booting system as a result of this LILO option. A Dell PowerEdge SC420 (Celeron 2.5GHz) system with BIOS dated 2004. I upgraded it from Etch to Lenny and it failed to reboot afterwards. Error message was that EBDA overlapped kernel memory. Only way to recover was to boot into Rescue CD and remove the large-memory option. This machine was obtained around two years ago so not very old as computers go.
I will try upgrading the BIOS next time it's due for downtime (Dell have a 2006 update) but I don't really expect it to make any difference to the location of the EBDA. So far, due to use of this option on supposedly "safe" systems, I have two non-booting systems with BIOSes later than 2001 (the advised cut-off date), compared with zero non-booting systems as a result of excessively large initrds. It seems to me that the large-memory option is just not safe to be applied as a general default. Perhaps it would be better to change the initrd default option to be "modules=dep" rather than just throwing everything in there and hoping the large-memory option will work. Only if the initrd proves not to fit should the user be asked if they want to try the large-memory option - preferably with a safe way to revert. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
