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

Steven Cole
2001-12-20T18:07:40Z

Greetings all,

I see that in the very latest Configure.help version, 2.76, available at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/cml2/
Eric has decided to follow the following standard:
IEC 60027-2, Second edition, 2000-11, Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology - Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics.
and has changed all the abbreviations for Kilobyte (KB) to KiB, Megabyte (MB) to MiB, etc, etc.

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.

Steven