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Hi,

I implemented my page allocation system ages ago and it all works very nicely. I just had a bit of a worry about PCI configuration spaces etc... which I haven't really dealt with yet.

At the moment, I build my RAM bitmap from the system memory map provided by GRUB / the BIOS. Every area marked as 'available' is added to the physical memory bitmap as free (this happens in my boot loader which later builds a stack-based system for the kernel.

Supposing I am later using PCI memory mapped devices. Will the system RAM map take this in to account, or do I have to scan the PCI bus and manually ensure that memory mapped areas are not assigned as RAM?

Also, supposing VESA resides at 0xE0000000 and I had a system with 4GB RAM, will this area already have been marked as unavailable by the BIOS? At present, My system only has 2GB, so it doesn't really matter as VESA space is outside the physical RAM space.

The main reason for my concern is that I prefer the stack allocation method. Obviously this makes it difficult to remove pages later on if they are found to be within some device's configuration space.

Cheers,
Adam

Just assume that the bios map is safe - i.e. it does not give you RAM where there isn't any.

Hi,

AJ wrote:Supposing I am later using PCI memory mapped devices. Will the system RAM map take this in to account, or do I have to scan the PCI bus and manually ensure that memory mapped areas are not assigned as RAM?

Also, supposing VESA resides at 0xE0000000 and I had a system with 4GB RAM, will this area already have been marked as unavailable by the BIOS? At present, My system only has 2GB, so it doesn't really matter as VESA space is outside the physical RAM space.

You shouldn't need to scan the PCI bus and manually ensure that memory mapped areas are not assigned as RAM.

If you've got 4 GB of RAM, then part of the physical address space will be reserved for PCI devices (e.g. from 0xC0000000 to 0xFFFFFFFF). For cheap motherboards this might mean you can only use 3 GB of RAM and the rest is wasted. For better motherboards the RAM will be remapped, so that (for e.g.) the fourth GB of RAM is from 0x0000000100000000 to 0x000000013FFFFFFF. In this case your OS will need to use PAE or PSE36 (or long mode) to access it.


Cheers,

Brendan

Thanks - that means I can stop worrying about having to remove pages from my page frame stack after boot-time!

Cheers,
Adam