Re: 'real mem' in dmesg much lower than expected?

[Pedro de Oliveira]

On 18-08-2011 20:16, Dave Anderson wrote:

I've been looking at a bunch of notebook dmesgs (i386, single processor)
recently and have noticed that the value reported for 'real mem' is
almost always much lower than the amount of memory actually installed.
A typical example is

   OpenBSD 5.0 (GENERIC) #39: Mon Aug  8 14:53:43 MDT 2011
       dera...@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC

   real mem  = 2900148224 (2765MB)

   spdmem0 at iic0 addr 0x50: 4GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-10600 SO-DIMM
   spdmem1 at iic0 addr 0x52: 2GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-10600 SO-DIMM

I understand that i386 cannot see more than 4GB due to architecture
restrictions, but even allowing for that well over a gigabyte has
vanished here.

A quick look at the code that generates this number shows that it's
skipping various areas reserved by the BIOS, etc., but the total amount
being skipped seems absurd.

Is there really supposed to be this much reserved space, or is something
wrong?

Thanks,

        Dave

Have you checked if the Video Card uses "shared memory" ?

Regards,
Pedro de Oliveira