[CentOS] Kernel build on i386 and nohighmem forbidden?

[Kevin K]

On Jun 28, 2006, at 9:29 AM, Linus Hicks wrote:

> I looked in the release notes, but maybe I missed it. Is it not  
> possible to build a kernel from CentOS 4.3 (using 2.6.9-34.0.1)  
> with HIGHMEM support turned off? This is for a machine with 512mb.
>
> When I try to build the kernel, I get _etext undefined symbol on  
> line 100 of pageattr.c in arch/i386/mm.
>
> Linus
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I've seen this myself with RHEL 4.

My speculation is that they are selling an Enterprise level OS, and  
they don't test builds for too small of computers.  In my case, I was  
trying to build a SMALL OS for boot floppies, and I noticed it was  
broken.  Took awhile to track it down to the right option.

But when some of the computers you have to support with it can have  
as little as 32MB, and the best computer has 1GB, it doesn't seem  
like you  need HIGHMEM :)