Dynamically changing amount of useable ram

["Peter Buelow" <pete@putzin.net>]

  I'm hoping someone can answer this. I haven't found the/an answer in any
of the other places I've looked (google, newgroups, HOWTO's, etc) Let me
state my problem, and then the question.

Problem.
I want to be able to store information across warm reboots on a PowerPC
machine (embedded Motorola product, 750 processor, regular DRAM to be
specific). There is a requirement to store diag/error data in raw DRAM
(driver handles access) and be able to get back to that after a warm reboot.
This is currently being done with another OS by limiting the amount of
memory the OS can see at boot (say 32MB) and then once the boot sequence
finishes, reading a file to determine exactly the amount of memory to be
reserved, and growing the kernel memory to fit. The boot process continues
at that point. Because the current OS utilizes a flat memory model, this is
fairly simple. With Linux, it becomes much more complex I think (but would
love to be proved wrong).

Question.
I am interested in moving this project to Linux and this is the first major
obstacle to overcome. Is there a mechanism for growing the amount of
available memory that the kernel can use once it has finished with the boot
process (minus init or most of init anyway)?

-- 
Cole's Axiom: The sum of intelligence on the planet is a constant. The
population is growing
--
Pete Buelow


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