Mandrake 9.0 doesn't seem to be able to boot with framebuffer enabled since i doubled my RAM from 512MB to 1 GB, the kernel panics without displaying anything at all. With 512mb, or with framebuffer disabled all works fine.

Other hardware is Geforce 4 Ti4200, EPoX 8RDA+ mobo (nForce 2 chipset), Athlon XP 2000+ (not that CPU should affect anything).

Any ideas?

Tried Failsafe mode, or without FB?
Maybe it's naff RAM?

Like i said it works fine if i boot without FB. But I *like* FB and want it back if possible.

And yeah it is naff RAM, but it works fine if cooled properly and I've plenty of that .

Oh, I forgot to mention that my 1GB consists of two sticks of DDR333, and I'm taking advantage of the dual memory controllers of the nForce2 to squeeze a little bit more speed out. Previously, I had just the one 512MB stick of DDR333.

So to summarize the difference in my system before and after the problem occurred:

Before:
1 x 512MB DDR
Not using DualDDR

After
2 x 512MB DDR
Using DualDDR

If I take out the extra stick, then I can work as before. Of course, my system gets slower and I have less RAM. If I leave it in, I have to disable framebuffer.

I'm at a loss here, I don't really see what difference the amount of RAM or speed of access should make...

Assuming no ipzo-kazoo hardware... the only thing I can think is that maybe there's a kernel bug in fb that doinks up with the lowmem option to the kernel when it should be highmem. You haven't recompiled your kernel with high-memory support have you? (needed to take advantage of greater than 960Mb).

Or... Its something wonky with the board and its allocation for framebuffering, maybe. That's just a little weird.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hmm, well KDE's RAM information thingy tells me I have 904.42MB of physical memory, as opposed to 1024MB which is what I actually have, so I guess this suggests I don't have high-memory support. Is there any reason Mandrake would disable that by default (apart from them being idiots, which I was already well aware of)?

Is your nvidia linux nforce driver up to date?

woops :0

Nah, that's smart, running a BigMem enabled kernel when you don't have it slows down a lot of other processes, apparently running one of the, I can't remember the name... perversely big memory kernels on less than 1gb is really pokey. They niches go: 4mb-9??mb, then up to 4Gb, then another notch up to 64Gb, which is the most the kernel can currently handle, I think.

A recompile up to Bigmem is rather easy, hoepfully its something as simple as that which is the culprit.

Cheers,

Finegan

In that case GRR at kernel people for designing it that way. Actually, I can answer my own question regarding memory reported as 900 and something MB; I have the AGP aperture size set to 128MB which accounts for the difference.

I shall try a kernel recompile and see if that helps matters.

I tried a recompile of the kernel to no avail. Any more ideas before I risk a BIOS upgrade?