On 23.03.2017 09:19, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > On Mi, 2017-03-22 at 11:19 +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote: >> On 22.03.2017 11:03, Thomas Huth wrote: >>> On 22.03.2017 10:08, Markus Armbruster wrote: >>> [...] >>>> Are we now ready to accept a simple & stupid patch that actually helps >>>> users, say letting boards that care declare minimum and maximum RAM >>>> size? And make PC reject RAM size less than 1MiB, even though "someone" >>>> might conceivably have firmware that works with less? >>> >>> I'd say enforce a minimum RAM size on the normal "pc" and "q35" machine, >>> but still allow smaller sizes on the "isapc" machine. So if "someone" >>> comes around and claims to have a legacy firmware that wants less memory >>> than 1MiB, just point them to the isapc machine. >>> Just my 0.02 €. >>> >>> Thomas >> >> Or maybe simply warn the user that things may go wrong instead of >> enforcing it. > > Why bother? I have my doubts physical i440fx works with less than 1M > either, given that this memory is needed to shadow the roms. Possibly > you can't even find dimms that are small to plug them into such a system > to try ...
Because it seems to work if you supply the correct rom. We are trying to catch user errors, don't we? > > I'd say just add a hard limit and be done with it. "640K ought to be enough for anybody". Any limit we set will become out of date. > > Maybe exclude isapc. That one hasn't shadow support so things have at > least a chance to work with less than 1M of memory. But honestly I'd > rather drop isapc, together with ia64 and sparc. I mean, what is the > use case? 'pc' machine type is compatible enough with vga and ide ports > being on the standard isa locations so even msdos which has no pci > support at all boots happily. I think I like that idea. > cheers, > Gerd > -- Thanks, David