Re: BIOS sees 4GB of RAM, not sure about the OS

digi wrote:

I found some information on the net about getting the BIOS to
recognize 4GB of RAM, but I'm running into a problem determining
if the OS is seeing all of it.

I upgraded my computer to 4GB of RAM. At first, the BIOS didn't recognize
all of it. (Only saw about 3GB). openSUSE also only saw about the same
amount. I enabled "Memory Remapping Feature" in the BIOS, and now the BIOS
can see all of it. I have an ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard.

I want to say that the kernel I'm using has bigsmp support. I've compiled
it several times when I first installed it (December 2006) and when
I run 'make menuconfig' I can see that bigsmp is enabled, so I'm hoping
I enabled that when I built it.

Once I boot up openSUSE 10.2, I get conflicting information about
how much RAM I have. (Well, it seems conflicting, but I'm not sure
exactly what the programs are reporting.) I've run these command
line utils to see what they say (the output is at the bottom)
That is probably correct. If the max memory for your system is 4GB, then the
OS will subtract the memory used by the various cards, etc. Like my system
only sees 3.3GB out of four. If you have less than the full capacity then
you do not see this issue.

Example: my video card has 256MB memory, If I have the full 4GB installed,
The memory display will show 4GB minus 256MB. If I have 3Gb installed it
will show 3Gb since the address space needed by the card is available.
There are several good write ups around on this if you google. I lost the
link to the ones I used. Also if your on SUSE search the list archive this
was discussed a lot. Sorry I do not have the links.
--
Russ
Registered Linux user #441463


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Relevant Pages

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