Re: Configure.help editorial policy

David Garfield
2001-12-21T20:24:56Z

Eric S. Raymond writes:
> What, and *encourage* non-uniform terminology? No, I won't do that.
> Better to have a single standard set of abbreviations, no matter how
> ugly, than this.

Valid argument. I will point out that the current version is
non-uniform. Quoting from Configure.help :

> # Choice: himem
> High Memory support
> CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM
> Linux can use up to 64 Gigabytes of physical memory on x86 systems.
> However, the address space of 32-bit x86 processors is only 4
> Gigabytes large. That means that, if you have a large amount of
> physical memory, not all of it can be "permanently mapped" by the
> kernel. The physical memory that's not permanently mapped is called
> "high memory".
>
> 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
> "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.
>
> If the machine has between 1 and 4 Gigabytes physical RAM, then
> answer "4GB" here.

Note "3GiB/1GiB" and "4GB".

--David