Re: Debian only sees 885.5 MiB memory
On Friday 15 June 2007 19:50, Stephen Cormier wrote:
> On June 15, 2007 12:33:04 pm Nigel Henry wrote:
> > On Friday 15 June 2007 16:46, arijit sarkar wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2007-06-15 at 08:02 -0500, Gary Rosenfeldt wrote:
> > > > Hello,
> > > >
> > > > I recently installed Debian Etch on my desktop system. My mobo is an
> > > > abit nf-7s with nforce2 chipset. I have 1 gig of ram installed but
> > > > debian only sees 885.5 MiB of my ram. Fortunately, I'm not
> > > > experiencing any stability issues. Anyone know the cause of this
> > > > oddity.
> > > >
> > > > Thanks,
> > > >
> > > > Gary
> > >
> > > It's obvious, your motherboard has 128mb shared memory. So debian sess
> > > only 885.5 mb.
> > > I also have 1gig RAM and 128 mb as shared graphics memory. My 'system
> > > monitor' shows ~885mb.
> > > check out your BIOS settings. :-)
> > >
> > > --
> > > Arijit Sarkar
> > > Kolkata, India
> >
> > That's interesting. I was booted up in Lenny using the 2.6.11 kernel, and
> > usually see Gkrellm showing 885Mb of my 1Gb RAM. I've since rebooted with
> > the 2.6.17 kernel , and with that kernel, Gkrellm is showing the full
> > 1005Mb of RAM. The onboard graphics card is a Cyberbladei1 (trident
> > driver).
> >
> > Quite why booting with the 2.6.11 shows 885Mb, and booting with the
> > 2.6.17 shows 1005Mb is a bit bizarre. Probably some kernel thingy.
>
> Yes it is a kernel thingy around the .15, .16, .17 time I can't recall
> which first had it but there was a patch called the 1gb lowmem which you
> could apply to allow a machine with 1gb of ram use all of it as lowmem
> instead of having to use the highmem option this patch was incorporated
> into the mainline kernel so you no longer had to patch it yourself to get
> all your memory. For your udev situation I see in another post you can
> always compile/install your own kernel which will not have a dependency on
> it this is what I do so I don't have to use it or try making a udev rule(s)
> to assign your /dev/video? devices the same everytime.
>
> > Nigel.
>
> Stephen
Ok. So what it comes down to then, is that earlier kernels, my 2.6.11 for
example arn't setup to use my 1GB of physical RAM, but just 885Mb of it. If
so, that's not really a problem, as 885Mb is a fair bit, and I've never gone
into the 1.5Gb of swap that's available.
I'll look into the udev problem, and compiling my own kernel. (only done this
once before for Gentoo, and that with someones help from a list).
Many thanks.
Nigel. aka farpoint.
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