Thanks to Frederik for the following success story:
PL5000, 512 MB mem
(side note: the PL5000 contains 1 EISA, 2 PCI/EISA, and 5 PCI slots)
4 PPro 200
Smart-2/DH
Debian Sarge (testing)
For the boot floppy (kernel 2.4.25) I used the following memory string
successfully:
mem=496@16M
During installation I chose to install the 2.6.5 SMP kernel which requires
a different memory string:
memmap=496M@16M
I checked the 2.6.5 kernel source and in arch/i386/kernel/setup.c starting from line 498
it says:
/*
* "mem=nopentium" disables the 4MB page tables.
* "mem=XXX[kKmM]" defines a memory region from HIGH_MEM
* to , overriding the bios size.
* "memmap=XXX[KkmM]@XXX[KkmM]" defines a memory region from
* to +, overriding the bios size.
I couldn’t easily find that anywhere in any docs. When I specified memmap=496M@16M, the system
booted fine and detected the full 512 MB.
Currently the box is running Debian 3.0 ‘Sarge’ (testing) without problems (with some hacks to
get in on there).
Hacks needed:
The cpqarray controller seems to be detected by the debian installer (at least in expert mode), but I recall that I had to manually insmod the cpqarray driver before partitioning.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=249355
Note, this bug should be fixed already in the Sarge boot floppies. Be sure to get the latest ones.