RE: [Linux-ia64] Memory clearing at reboot

["Saxena, Sunil" <sunil.saxena@intel.com>]

Hi John,

Big Sur initializes it's memory only on power on; it does not do so on a
soft reboot.  The behavior you are seeing should continue on all build of
our BIOS.

I am waiting for the answer on the Lion machine and do not know if Lion team
can also enable this functionality.  I will respond again once I have the
answer.  (By the way, my gut feelings says that they will not be able to
enable this functionality.)

Thanks
Sunil 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Baboval [mailto:baboval@mclinux.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 11:50 AM
To: linux-ia64@linuxia64.org
Subject: [Linux-ia64] Memory clearing at reboot


I have a small test program that I run at the EFI shell prompt to set an
area of memory and then perform a warm reboot. After the reboot our BigSur
still contains the values written, but the Lion is cleared to zero. (We
check the contents with the mem command, and the ResetSystem() is called
with the EfiResetWarm parameter.)

Does anyone know if there is a way to cause the Lion *not* to clear memory?
Also, our Lion has newer firmware then the BigSur. Perhaps the newer
firmware causes the reset? 

If someone out there has a BigSur with the latest firmware/CPU rev., could
you run my program and tell me if your machine resets it's memory? The
source code is attached, and you can build it with gnu-efi-0.9.

Basically, you run the program and write down the address, and then when the
machine comes back up type 'mem <Address>' and see if the memory is zero or
not.

Not reseting memory makes taking kernel core dumps with our in-memory core
dump patches MUCH easier! Thanks for any help,

-- 
--John
jbaboval@missioncriticallinux.com