On Kolivas's page concerning the lowmem patch, the following is stated:

"1g lowmem?
Many machines now have exactly 1Gb ram and the standard memory split on i386 does not allow you to use more than 896Mb ram without enabling high memory for at least 4Gb. The problem is that this incurs an overhead whereas we can simply change this split with this patch to allow i386 architectures to use up to 1Gb ram without enabling highmem. This is configurable if HIGHMEM is disabled. The disadvantage is a small group of programs depend on the split and will not work (such as vmware)."


Sqeezing out every availible byte of ram to run an XP installation in vmware was precisely why I was interested in finally biting the bullet and applying the patch. Can anybody tell me why vmware needs the split where it is?

Actually, never mind. XP and Slack coexist amazingly well with VMware Workstation 5.0, even using only 896meg. It still might be interesting from an academic perspective, but for practical purposes it doesn't seem to matter.