[syslinux] Syslinux Mem= greater than 4096M

[Kevin Sullivan]

Hi Everyone. I have a question that I have researched, but cannot find an
answer. I was wondering if any of the syslinux guru's might have some
suggestions for me. We use syslinux (4.04) to boot a specialized USB
distribution of Linux that requires the mem= flag to be added to the
syslinux.cfg file. The mem= flag is a requirement as this is a custom
kernel distribution that uses kernel modules in a highly specialized
manner. I can set mem= all the way up to 4096M, but at 4097 and greater, I
get the error message of:

Not enough memory to load specified image.

We have a boot CD port of this same distribution using the legacy (grub 1)
boot, and it accepts mem= to levels tested as high as 8192M.

Now, obviously, I'm likely hitting a 32 bit syslinux limitation, but we
love using syslinux on our USB distribution as it boots on every system
that we test on, whereas grub has proven to be problematic.

So, can anyone suggest a method for us to pass a mem= 4097M or greater?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Or, on another note, would
grub2 be a viable bootloader for USB storage?

Thanks,

-Kevin