This may be obvious to a programmer, but...: ./Documentation/more kernel-parameters.txt : reserve= [KNL,BUGS] force the kernel to ignore some iomem area. http://cuip.uchicago.edu/doc/lilo-0.21/ : reserve=<base>,<size>,... reserves IO port regions. This can be used to prevent device drivers from auto-probing addresses where other devices are located, which get confused by the probing. 'man bootparam' : `reserve=...' This is used to protect I/O port regions from probes. The form of the command is: reserve=iobase,extent[,iobase,extent]... In some machines it may be necessary to prevent device drivers from checking for devices (auto-probing) in a specific region. This may be because of hardware that reacts badly to the probing, or hardware that would be mistakenly identified, or merely hardware you don't want the kernel to initialize. The reserve boot-time argument specifies an I/O port region that shouldn't be probed. A device driver will not probe a reserved region, unless another boot argument explicitly specifies that it do so. For example, the boot line reserve=0x300,32 blah=0x300 keeps all device drivers except the driver for `blah' from probing 0x300-0x31f. The more recent Linux documentation says iomem, while the majority of other documentation says io port. Given that /proc/ contains both, I'd like to see a clearification... Dag B - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/