My simple question is: why not?!?

The answer is very simple:
Because.

Do you realize what you asked?
I mean each distro got it's own compiled kernel...

Setting high memory makes sense these days, where having 512Mg of RAM is typical for new machines, and where having 1G of RAM is impressive but not exactly uncommon. I'd agree that it would be nice if it were the default

Is a PC with 1GB ram or more realy unusual (2GB in my case)? All memory above 1GB isn't used by the default (generic 2.6) kernel.

are you against compiling your own kernel? This is generally a good idea anyways, even if everything works fine. I like to only run as much kernel as I need.

regards,
...drkstr

I'm not against compiling your kernel (No SMT and reiser4 without kernel compile/patch), but compling the kernel should be an option, no must.

Highmem causes a reduction in performance.

Personally, I can't tell on my machine.

I really doubt we are at the point where we can consider having support for 4 GB of RAM a must.

Maybe worth adding a highmem kernel as an install option, probably with smp support as well as the two tend to go together, but not as default as highmem will slow a more typical 256Mb or less machine.

Yes that would be really good.

The only thing why I recompile my kernel is because of high memory support.
It would surely make sense these days, lots of machines have at least 1 GB of RAM Servers as well as desktop machines.

Under what conditions?

Dennisk

On machines with less than 1 gig of memory.

On another note, IIRC, when I upgraded to 1GB of memory I initially didn't choose the 4GB option in the kernel compile. I noticed in the scroll of startup messages (and with dmesg, I think) some message about only so much memory being available (the amount it said was available was at least 150M below the 1GB I had installed).

I noticed this one day and then chose the 4GB option in kernel config. I then chose the memory model (I think it's 3GB/1GB, then has a comment about having full 1GB lower mem available or something). Message didn't appear after that.

Then again, that was on 32-bit slackware (I'm using Slamd64 now). For some reason I'm thinking that I haven't even been asked about the memory stuff in kernel config with x86_64 config except for choosing model (flat or sparse). Then again I'm not that good at all at this stuff so I don't know for sure. But I do know about getting that memory message I posted above about limited low memory with 32-bit slackware and it disappeared when choosing 4GB memory in kernel config.

Check out Section 2 of this article regarding the mysterious 880Mg limit

Excellent read. Thanks much.