Re: What to do with slow Chip/ST RAM

[Frank Wille <frank%phoenix.owl.de@localhost>]

David Brownlee wrote:

>   Both amiga and atari have the concept of 'fast' and 'slow' RAM.
>   For a system with a reasonable amount of fast RAM using the
>   slow RAM can actually slow things down, though it seems like
>   a shame to waste it...
> 
>   Jared has written a driver for the sgimips O2 to allow it to
>   access some of its extra memory banks as a block device, which
>   means it can use it as a RAM swap device. (The issue with the O2
>   is different, as the current NetBSD kernel cannot use that extra
>   memory directly, but the principle is related).

Very nice (I'm reading sgimips too).


>   Would anyone be interested in adding support to use chip/ST
>   RAM on the amiga/atari in a similar fashion (obviously some of
>   it is likely to be reserved for device DMA).

I doubt that it would work very well for Amiga, because (I think) the amount
of available Chip RAM is not constant. There may be allocations for floppy
disk, audio or video DMA buffers at any time.

The altmem device works with a fixed contiguous memory region?


-- 
    _  Frank Wille (frank%phoenix.owl.de@localhost)
 _ //  http://sun.hasenbraten.de/~frank/
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