Re: [SLE] SuSE 10.1 32bit and 4GB RAM, seen are 3.5GB


could it be a e820 related issue?

No, not really. The PCI address space and such must be mapped _somewhere_
within the 4 GB. There may be boards out there which
- either remap the PCI address space above 4 GB
- or remap the memory that has been shadowed by the pci addr space above
4 GB


The BIOS provides the following RAM map:

snippet from boot.msg:

<6>BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
<4> BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 00000000000a0000 (usable)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 00000000dfe86c00 (usable)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000dfe86c00 - 00000000dfe88c00 (ACPI NVS)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000dfe88c00 - 00000000dfe8ac00 (ACPI data)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000dfe8ac00 - 00000000e0000000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000f0000000 - 00000000f4000000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 00000000fed00400 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000fed20000 - 00000000feda0000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000fee00000 - 00000000fef00000 (reserved)
<4> BIOS-e820: 00000000ffb00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
<5>2686MB HIGHMEM available.
<5>896MB LOWMEM available.

So somewhere, I loose the memory right there.

Thanks,

Martin

thanks to all of you!

I have tried several different kernels.
Configured with the 4/4GB split and with sparse/flat/disconigous memory
model. Nothing helped.
I could not find a BIOS settings to re-map the memory for the integrated
peripherals.

Would anybody think, that disabling onboard NIC and sound and replacing
them with PCI cards could help?

The slackware kernel which was previously installed (and saw the 4GB) does
not even load on this computer anymore (maybe because it doesn't like suse
;) ) .
I could not find out which mainboard is built in. I'm gonna open the box
another time, maybe I overlooked something.

So I am still puzzled. I booted off of the Suse 10.1 64bit after I saw in
the bios, that the CPU is actually 64bit capable (intel's EM64T) but that
didn't change a thing.

Thanks!

Martin


On 8/28/06, Ken Jennings <ken_jennings@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Monday 28 August 2006 06:59, you wrote:
On 8/28/06, Ken Jennings wrote:
[...]
A: Due to standard PC architecture, a certain amount of
memory is
reserved for
system usage and therefore the actual memory size is less
than the
stated
amount. For example, 4GB of memory size will instead be
shown as
3.xxGB
memory during system startup. THE MEMORY SIZE WILL BE
VARIED
according to
different chipsets, different VGA card used, DIFFERENT
ONBOARD
CONTROLLERS like audio and LAN etc, different add on cards
used.


You should see a similar message in the manual under
"Feature
Summary". In
the English manual that's section 1-2, page 12.

All that onboard stuff -- lan, Audio, disks, etc. Have to
live
somewhere
in
the memory map, so some RAM is "lost" if you have maxed out
your
RAM.

thank you.
This sounds pretty OS independant. How come that another
installed
distro
could actually see all of the 4GB?

It may not actually be OS independent. I understand from some other
people it
may be possible to do a few kernel tweaks to rescue the memory hiding
behind
the I/O area provided the motherboard actually supports 64-bit
addressing.
Basically, the kernal asks the bios to map the hidden RAM to a space
above
the 4G (32-bit) memory map. From what I'm told, this isn't something
Windows
can do, so the motherboard docs may simply be stating reality from a
Windows-centric point of view. (Though I have no clue if your board
can
really do this.)

Thanks,
Ken Jennings





Jan Engelhardt
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