bigphysarea facilates the reservation (at boot time) and allocation (later) of large blocks of contiguous RAM.

This is a very old patch. We (MH, DVW) have been updating it for compilation against recent kernels, in particular against Ubuntu packaged kernel sources, but it is slowly becoming harder to do so. The 3.13.0 patch (for Ubuntu-14.04) drops proc-file support (/proc/bigphysarea) from the patch, as a result of the long-deprecated old-style proc-file API used by the patch being removed from the kernel. This removal does not affect MAS operation.

The new kernel driver for the most recent PCI card firmware (U0107) no longer requires bigphysarea.