Why would Suse, on opteron, miss 500 megs of RAM?

Hello. I'm using Suse 9.3 and 10.0 in our lab, on a dual opteron
(248s) IBM Intellistation A Pro or on a Dell Precision 470 Workstation.


Regardless of how much RAM I put in the dual opteron (from 4 to 8
gigs), it does not see all of the RAM, even when I use IBM-branded RAM.
The free command shows .5 gig less than is installed. When the machine
boots it shows the count of ram, and gets up to the full installed
amount, and then drops back down half a gig, then boots. IBM support
has come out on multiple occasions and done diagnostics, and their
software shows the full installed amount is recognized. They always
make sure the BIOS is the latest. I have worked with Chip Merchants
tech support and run their downloadable Memory tester, and it shows the
memory being short .5 gigs too. But they sent me two separate kinds of
RAM, and we have IBM RAM, and no matter which I install 8 gigs of, I
get the same results with the tester and with the free command, but the
IBM diagnostics show the full memory.

On our Dells, running the same OS, with 4 gigs of RAM, the free command
shows the full amount of installed RAM.

Is anybody aware of any reason why Suse would show a half-gig less than
the RAM installed on just the IBM, or any further tests I can try? At
this point I don't know if all the RAM is being used but Suse doesn't
report it or reserves some of it on the IBM opteron macine, or if in
fact not all of the RAM is being utilized or seen on the opteron
machine. IBM techs, of course, run their diagnostics and tell me it's
fine. I've elevated it as many tiers in tech support as I can, and
never reached anyone that had any idea.

Thanks,
Jim

.

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