In <199611132328.SAA04820@untraceable.net> codewarrior@daemon.org (Andrew Brown) writes:

>>as suggested by Tatoku Ogaito, Zdenek Salvet and Mike Long, I needed
>>to increase NKPDE in /sys/arch/i386/include/pmap.h from 12 to 24.
>>My machine now works with 64 MB. 

>this makes no sense to me at all.  i've got dozens of machines running
>(1.1, 1.2, and current) that have 64M and have no problems what so ever.
>it's only when i try to convince the kernel to use more than that (96,
>maybe 128) that it can't stay up more than a minute or two.  anyone
>got ideas about this?

Well, I also had the line

options         SHMMAXPGS=4096  # 1024 pages is the default

in my kernel config file; with the default setting of 1024 the kernel
has no problems with 64 MB even when NKPDE is not bumped to 24. Setting 
NKPED to 24 allowed me to boot even with a SHMMAXPGS setting of 4096 
(having some more shared memory is good when playing around with "The Gimp" 
- the more shared memory you have, the more windows you can open).

Btw, is there a hard limit of what SHMMAXPGS can be set to, or are there
reasons why one should keep this at the lowest setting one can get away
with?

Klaus