The attached patch is a prototype implementation of memory hot-add. It allows you to boot your system, and add memory to it later. Why would you want to do this? Well, it's a step before memory removal which can help cope with things like bad RAM. This is primarily useful for a machine that you don't want to reboot during an upgrade. For instance, on my 1GB laptop, I booted with mem=512M on the kernel command-line. Once I had booted, I did the following: cd /sys/devices/system/memory echo 0x20000000 > probe echo 0x30000000 > probe echo online > memory2/state echo online > memory3/state and the last 512MB of my laptop's memory was onlined. The onlining operations can occur from an /etc/hotplug script if desired. Here's the config file that I used: http://www.sr71.net/patches/2.6.11/2.6.11-rc3-mhp1/configs/config-i386-T41-laptop The important config options are: CONFIG_MEMORY_HOTPLUG=y CONFIG_SPARSEMEM=y CONFIG_SIMULATED_MEM_HOTPLUG=y This patch depends on the previously posed "Sparse Memory Handling (hot-add foundation)" patch. There are a number of individual patches (with descriptions) which are rolled up in the attached patch: all of the files listed after "G2-no-memory-at-high_memory-ppc64.patch" from this directory: http://www.sr71.net/patches/2.6.11/2.6.11-rc3-mhp1/broken-out/ I can post individual patches if anyone would like to comment on them. -- Dave