Re: Changing KB, MB, and GB to KiB, MiB, and GiB in Configure.help.

Michael Dunsky
2001-12-20T18:45:43Z

Hi!

You are close - he uses "MiB" as short for "mebi" - Mega-binary.
Don't laugh - this is official! It's exactly for what you said:

What is 1 MB?
1.000.000 Byte
or
1.048.576 Byte

For a short reading I recommend this:

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

ciao

Michael

Matt Bernstein wrote:

> I believe that the main purpose of documentation, help etc is to get the
> information across in a way that is most easily understood, ie that
> minimises the number of support questions.. ..and everyone surely knows
> what GB, MB and KB stand for. So let's leave it at that. Where's the "i"
> in "megabyte" ? Or is 1MiB 1000000 bytes, rather than 1048576?
>
> It's confusing enough with the 10 "Mb" networking / 1.44 "MB" floppy
> distinction already..
>
> At 11:02 -0700 Steven Cole wrote:
>
>
>>Now, granted that this is the "standard", should there be some
discussion related to this
>>change, or is everyone comfortable with this? It certainly made me
do a double take.
>>
>>Here is a snippet from the diff between versions 2.75 and 2.76 of
Configure.help:
>>
>>@@ -344,8 +344,8 @@
>> If you are compiling a kernel which will never run on a machine with
>> more than 960 megabytes of total physical RAM, answer "off" here
>> (default choice and suitable for most users). This will result in a
>>- "3GB/1GB" split: 3GB are mapped so that each process sees a 3GB
>>- virtual memory space and the remaining part of the 4GB virtual memory
>>+ "3GiB/1GiB" split: 3GiB are mapped so that each process sees a 3GiB
>>+ virtual memory space and the remaining part of the 4GiB virtual
memory
>> space is used by the kernel to permanently map as much physical memory
>> as possible.
>>
>
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