Beracah - 2018-06-07

Hi, is it possible for the imdisk driver to provide the disk wrapper around (fixed) physical memory starting at some address (say +16GB) and of some size, say 24GB (my use case) ? Since it is running as administrator, perhaps with kernel mode rights, it should be able to directly access the memory address space? (sidestep the virtual space)

There's a specific set of circumstances, e.g. Windows Home Premium, which blocks off access to upper memory (I thought an OS was supposed to operate/enable system resources, not disable it), while still maintaining it as addressable. The kernel controls, but doesn't allow userspace access to, upper memory. Normally one wouldn't want to do what I'm suggesting, due to the ability to clobber userspace/or other DMA access to memory, but Windows "bcdedit truncate" memory command should explicitly prevent all other programs from accessing a particular region. (actually, this would also help users with >192G of ram, since w7 64 doesn't allow access to that either)

It would be an AMAZING feature if it works -- windows 7 upgrades are disabled, and those available updates cost more than an entirely new system, and I certainly don't want windows 10 -- the only option for new systems. w10 is running on another machine and broken half of my applications and randomly deletes my research.

Anyway, there's no reason (that I see) that direct address space imputation can't be used if the sata/memory driver is running in kernel mode. The user can be responsible for blocking addresses from the kernel general use.

Ideally I would love to start a ramdisk up in UEFI mode, or have the BIOS allocate it as a virtual block device. Then I could truly use the memory however I liked.

What do you think?
Thanks