In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: x86/mm: Check return value from memblock_phys_alloc_range() At least with CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START=0x100000, if there is < 4 MiB of contiguous free memory available at this point, the kernel will crash and burn because memblock_phys_alloc_range() returns 0 on failure, which leads memblock_phys_free() to throw the first 4 MiB of physical memory to the wolves. At a minimum it should fail gracefully with a meaningful diagnostic, but in fact everything seems to work fine without the weird reserve allocation.