On 07/03/2012 08:09 PM, Naren (Narendra) Sankar wrote:

This should not be hard-coded.

The current board has 256MB but still allows the VC to use different RAM configuration splits. So the u-boot/Linux partition can get more than 128MB.

While that's true, I believe there's currently no runtime API available to retrieve the memory split information. When such an API is available, we can remove the hard-coded limit and use the API instead.

Such an API has been requested; see: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/47

And it is possible to support up to 1GB of DRAM on this platform.

The hard-coding is in a location specific to the Raspberry-Pi model B. So, it doesn't impose any restrictions on any other boards using the same SoC. While the BCM2835 SoC may allow more memory, the RPi B specifically only supports exactly 256MB.