Dave Ewart wrote:
On Thursday, 23.12.2004 at 12:33 -0500, JerryN wrote:
Hello List,
I observed a similar behaviour on my Sarge laptop (Inspiron 8200): I have 1GB ram but /proc/mening shows (only) 905136 kB and the Gnome system monitor 884 MB.
I have to say that my kernel is not 4GB enabled: so far I thought that 1GB was smaller that 4GB.
In fact, according to the help message provided by the kernel, 1GB is on the edge: so it is not so clear to me wether the kernel must be 4GB enabled.
There's something magic about that 905MB line - a 1GB RAM machine of ours showed that amount as total RAM when on a non-4GB and non-64GB kernel. Don't know why exactly it's 905MB, but that ties up with what I saw. It's not sharing with AGP memory, because my system didn't have that.
Once upgraded to a 4GB kernel, the full 1GB was visible.
Dave.
I am rebuilding my kernel with this option.
We will see,
There are three memory zones on x86 for linux ZONE_DMA < 16 MB ZONE_NORMAL 16-896 MB ZONE_HIGHMEM > 896 MB
related to various hardware limitations. There's some interesting discussions of this in 'Linux Kernel Development' by R. Love. -peter
I have the book. Sorry, but it's about as practically informative as these numerous emails.
Stop top-posting, don't make pointless criticisms and read the messages.
I think this discussion has been sensible. Peter's comments above showing the memory zones answers everything; if you have more than 896MB (possibly the same point as 905MB, depending on how you calculate your megabytes) then you need to provide extra support in the kernel to be able to use all your RAM.
You either do this by getting a pre-packaged kernel with the appropriate support, or you build it yourself with one of the high memory options configured.
That's pretty informative, no?
Dave.
Very informative indeed: I have just installed my rebuild kernel and according to /proc/meminfo I gained ~130 MB of RAM. This amount must be compared with the ~150 MB used by my box as background.
Jerome
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